Session 54 — The Second Rung on the Ladder

Session Recap

The mine finally runs out of rooms. Magra steps out of the labs with Dr. Xiao Li and the scientist Polos and tracks the rest of the party down by the trail of slime hugging the right-hand wall, which is how the party navigates and how Jex leaves a signature. The reunited group clears the last two rooms on the miners' own map — a fire-untouched supply store where one crate has been crowbarred open and emptied of a pair of gauntlets, and a living quarters where a shade kneels over a pair of crushed legs. Lash digs past the legs with two pickaxes, finds the missing gauntlets under the rubble by feel, and brings the whole ceiling down on herself; Silithane hauls her out by the ankles. They are gravity gauntlets — white golem-crystal set into the backs of the hands, and a no-save, no-check pull that drags every creature within 20 feet of a chosen point straight to it. The table spends ten minutes discovering that this is horrifying, and Lash puts them on over her blacksmith's gloves.

Then the party goes back down the flooded crawl to finish the thing it has been circling for three sessions. The bone dragon dies in about five rounds — restrained for the first of them by Thalia's Entangle, which woke it — after a breath of black acid and dark magic, a rib-cage swallow that Silithane escapes on a burned inspiration, and a Bonestorm that tears every buried bone in the room into a counter-clockwise cyclone and drops Lash. At 1 hit point it refuses to die through three escalating Constitution saves, drops Silithane with its tail in the same instant his own past self steals his Shadow Blade back, and is finally killed by a Booming Blade its unconscious caster left on it. Magra takes the +2 dragon-slaying short sword out of its skull — by pulling the skull off the sword — and Jex inherits the +3 dragon-slaying arrow that was buried where its heart would have been, after Silithane pulls it out of the spine and straight into himself for doubled damage, because he is a dragon. The party limps back through the labs for first aid, takes its first long rest in a day and a half under hot showers run off Foredweller fire-machines, and hits level 8. Dr. Xiao Li has held her general meeting off-screen and is leaving with them; the way out is the scientists' north tunnel, and the destination is Eldrich the Elder.

Key Events

• Magra tracks the party by slime. Sent out of the labs with Dr. Xiao Li and Polos, Magra is told "I think it is pertinent that you lead" — Dr. Lee eyeing her crossbow and, nervously, the giant boring machine parked outside the door. There is only one direction to go, and Jex's slime trail clings to the right-hand wall at every junction: into the dragon's lair and back out again, down the side passages and back out again. The mine's kneeling shades ignore them entirely. Dr. Lee's read on the tunnels: "they were not quite sure what they were" doing.
• The miners' map, one session too late. In the next chamber is the mine crew's own mapping system — every tunnel dug, every accidental collapse, every corridor marked stop going this way. Dr. Xiao Li notes with interest that her team's tunnel appears nowhere on it, which places the scientists chronologically after the fire. The party has already been to all but two rooms on it. The GM's verdict on his own prepared handout: "this would have been a lot more useful if you'd found it before looking everywhere." Among the rooms they had already stumbled into blind, the map records a worm skeleton the miners dug up, which rose, killed a crew, and had its tunnel blown down on top of it — the sort of warning it would have given them, had they found it first. Taken as the Miner's Expedition Journal.
• The supply room. Fire-untouched, a year or two of perishables rotting behind held noses. Candle-holder helmets, hooded lanterns, barrels of oil, dozens of shovels and pickaxes, around twenty crowbars, pitons, spare shoes, 5–10 healer's kits (two taken; Thalia wants one strapped to Salamandine like a St Bernard's barrel) — and one set of archaeology brushes, because the crew went down not knowing whether they were digging for a single buried Autarch shard or nothing at all. They found a facility instead.
• The crate with two gauntlet-shaped holes. Fenric's magic-sight reads nothing in the room but a trace on one crate — long-term storage pried open with a crowbar, packed straw still holding the impression of two gauntlets that are not there. Somebody grabbed them when the fire started.
• The last room, and the hobby dig. The living quarters: an egg-shaped chamber drilled out with a domed roof and fire pits sunk into the floor, triple bunk beds, personal-effects chests — and an offshoot side-tunnel where a shade kneels over a pair of skeletal legs crushed under rubble. The map explains it: a miner dug there in his own time, on his own hunch, and the crew didn't even think it was the right direction. The gauntlets are not on the legs.
• "Rib bone, rib bone, clavicle, skull, tooth, arm, arm — metal gauntlet." Lash takes a pickaxe in each hand and digs, the shade rising to point at the ceiling in horror as the roof above starts to lurch. She builds a card-house of leaning rocks, reaches in blind, and finds the gauntlets by touch. Pulling the first starts the collapse; she grabs the second anyway, and Silithane catches her by the ankles (Sleight of Hand) and drags her out backwards as the whole passage comes down — burying the miner, the ghost, and the rest of the skeleton with him.
• The gauntlets identified. Silithane spends ten loud minutes with chalk in the one room in the mine the party has confirmed is empty. Set into the backs of the hands are the same smooth processed white crystals as the crystal golem's core, and the effect is gravity: name a point, and every creature within 20 feet of it is dragged to it — no saving throw, no check, no attack roll, and no opportunity attacks, since the movement is involuntary. "Definitely above common, but not epic or legendary." See Gravity Gauntlets.
• Ten minutes of discovering what that means. Aim it at the ceiling for fall damage. Aim it at a point 20 feet above one creature. Pair it with a telescope and pull a ship's crew overboard from unlimited range. Pull enemies off a cliff, or under water and keep them there. Hold a rope and pull the creature off the thing you want. The GM's own favourite: Thalia opens the hat and Lash vacuums the inside of it, sucking everything within 20 feet into the void. Thalia declines to be "the sucking character"; Silithane passes; Fenric volunteers but already wears Gladiator's Vambraces; Lash takes them, swapping out her blacksmith's gloves — her turns are usually dodge, attack or Help, and dragging things off her friends is a straight upgrade.
• Magra refuses the deal too. Magra confirms she was in the room for the Autarch's offer — and refuses it flat. Offered instead the chance to raise other deals that are available through her sister, she answers "that's a big no," and the GM supplies the reason: "I never tell her anything." Lash: "All the good deals are in the Veilwood anyway. I'm just waiting to become the vampire axolotl." — "Vampalotl."
• What's actually left in the mountain. The GM counts the remaining threats: the mining camp up top, which has had two days to work out that something is happening below; the dragon; and whatever has moved into the scientists' own 60-mile bored tunnel in the year since they used it. "If you leave a 60-mile bored tunnel to the Underdark, something's gonna call it home."
• The deep doors, clarified. The party has been carrying "two unopened doors" as a mystery for two sessions. There is no mystery: the scientists can open the far door, they simply have no reason to — it is the edge of what they've explored, and it runs about 60 miles to another facility. Ignore the two tunnels that breach the ruin and there is an in, an out, a left way and a right way, and both ways lead somewhere else.
• No drill. Thalia's plan to shove the boring machine down the tunnel and drive it into the dragon is retired on the grounds that the machine cannot turn corners, would have to drill through walls to get there, would announce itself doing so, and might drop the tunnel on everyone. "Pretty sure I was on mushrooms when I was saying that. Oh, but I think I'm still on mushrooms."
• Into the lair by hat. Rather than crawl a flooded tunnel — cave-ins and drowning at once — Thalia folds herself into the hat, is thrown to the far side, and climbs out there, keeping the 20-ft crawl inside her 30-ft Pass Without Trace. Magra, Silithane and Fenric wriggle through on Acrobatics checks; Lash and Jex don't need them. The dragon sleeps through all of it.
• The dragon dies. Five rounds, roughly 700 hit points, and a stack of damage reductions that hit piercing hardest. See Combat & Encounters.
• "You have killed a draconic creature." The GM's summing-up afterwards: no arms, no legs, no wings, and it was not alive when they got to it — "maybe it's like the second rung on the ladder" — but very few groups in the world can point at themselves and say on a technical level that they have slain a dragon. It is also, the table establishes, the first one this party has actually fought: the other one they half-claim was put back to sleep by a spell, off-screen, by a player who had already left the game, with none of them present.
• Pulling the skull off the sword. The dragon's head is submerged. Silithane plants his feet on it and heaves and nothing whatsoever happens ("come forth, King Arthur — noodle arms"). Magra rolls 16 against a lower DC, and the GM reframes the problem: "it's not about pulling the sword from the skull, it's about pulling the skull from the sword." She braces either side of the crossguard, rips the skull off, tosses the blade and catches it. It has good weighting. She keeps it — "Silithane's too small and too noodle-armed to take it off you."
• The arrow in its heart, and the dragon it proved. During the fight both archers spot, besides the sword through its forehead, an arrow lodged where a heart would be — the only two things from the original killing that haven't rotted away in however many centuries, which is how they knew both were magic. Silithane tries to draw it, at disadvantage because it's small, and rolls a natural 1; Magra burns her reroll reaction purely for the comedy and he rolls another 1. He pulls it free and puts it through himself: one piece of ammunition's worth of damage, doubled to 12 because he is a dragon — the running joke settled by a magic item. Magra wrenches it out of him without a check ("you are a huge orc who pulls arrows out of things all the time"), a d2 decides arrow-or-bolt, and it comes up arrow — so it goes to Jex. See Dragon-Slaying Arrow.
• Seventy teeth, left on the floor. Lash eyes up the dragon's teeth — as many as 70, each the size of a small dog and half a pound, and every one of them already damaged. Centuries in a wet cave have left the bone in such poor condition that no check is needed to pull them out at all, unlike the sun-dried Toxico teeth she already carries. She inspects them and calls it herself — too damaged — leaves them all, and drops 20 lbs of ore besides; she is at her carrying cap, and the GM points out that about 90% of her sheet has been written as weighing nothing.
• Dr. Lee, waiting at the top. After the ~100-ft climb of 20-ft ledges, Dr. Xiao Li is at the lip looking anxious — the party's parting instruction having been "if you don't hear back from us in an hour, goodbye forever," which is behaviour normal people don't encounter outside adventuring groups. Lash: "There's a re-deaded dead dragon now… your neighbour's quiet now."
• The Dragon War, named. Shown the sword, Dr. Xiao Li admits she didn't think there were dragons left at all "apart from the really big one they paid tribute to" — she isn't religious and doesn't go north. She resolves to find a historian or a dragonologist at the next settlement with knowledgeable people in it. When Lash brings up the story that Laewendas flew on a dragon and killed all the others, it is Polos who supplies the name: "They call it the Dragon War." Lash, suspicious: why does a man from the Acropolis know Rivalonian propaganda?
• A night in the labs. Dr. Lee walks them back through the research station "really, really slowly" for first aid, and up the ladder to the facility's second floor — sleeping, bathing and hot showers, run off the water the Foredweller fire-machines make downstairs. The party's first long rest in a day and a half, spent picking bone shrapnel out of themselves and occasionally putting a piece back: "wait, that was my bone, that hurt." Nearly everyone burns every hit die they have, which the GM notes means a fight tomorrow will be fought with no healing left. Magra spends her Encouraging Song on Heroic Inspiration for Thalia, Fenric and Silithane — three is her cap, her proficiency bonus, and she rotates it between rests — and Fenric restocks Lash out of his own nine potions (four minor, five normal) after she spent her last one on the floor of the lair.
• Level 8. The dragon was the pip. Almost everyone takes an ability score improvement. Fenric takes Mage Slayer, importing the older version for its reaction-attack on any caster within 5 feet, and the GM hands him one free ASI point (into Dex) to make up the difference. Lash spends hers on Advanced Beast Training for Salamandine: +4 to all damage, +3 AC, +3 to all saves, and hit points scaling at 4× her level over an 18 base — 50 HP. She turns down Beast Boxcar, the joke feat that teaches a companion to operate land vehicles, brackets trains, despite heavy lobbying ("you don't know the power of a train yet"). Magra takes +2 Constitution. Jex takes Dex. Silithane's is his seventh level in his main class (his first was Rogue), unlocking a new tier of spell slots. Thalia's class handed her a feature the GM's custom subclass had already given her; he strips the duplicate.
• Salamandine learns to lick his wounds. Foundry has nowhere to put hit dice on an NPC sheet and clicking the button breaks his health outright, so the GM spends twenty minutes and gives Salamandine a proper long-rest self-heal instead: "they've spent their whole life just not getting injured, and now they've spent a couple of months getting beaten up, and they're like, okay, I need to fix this."
• The gauntlets, nerfed for the sun's sake. As written they had unlimited range, which the table works out means aiming them at the sun and dragging it 20 feet closer every day until the world boils. Jex does the arithmetic — 67 million years to bring it all the way in — and the GM points out you only need to leave the Goldilocks zone. Between scenes he caps the range at 200 feet, bars targets bigger than the 20-ft square they're being pulled into, and grants Lash's request that the fall damage land instantly. There is still no saving throw.
• The way out. Not the party's own lift and the mining camp above it: the scientists' north tunnel, out the far side of the mountain. Lash's reasoning is that whatever has crawled into an unused tunnel is less frightening than a garrison that knows they're coming. From there, back to Eldrich the Elder at the Menagoles, with Dr. Xiao Li and Polos travelling along. Her general meeting happened off-screen — an hour of talking science at scientists, then "by the way, I'm going to be gone for a couple of weeks, this person's in charge." Thalia's realistic assessment: Eldrich will pitch the Reclamation to seventeen scientists far better than the party could.

Combat & Encounters

• The bone dragon — killed. The campaign's first real dragon kill, and the fight the party had been building toward since Session 52.
  • The setup. Group Pass Without Trace through the flooded crawl; the archers (Magra, Jex) climb to the high ledges, Fenric takes the front, Silithane and Lash work the flanks, and everyone spreads out against a breath weapon. Lash's History check (17) on its earlier pursuit establishes it is slightly faster than she is. Three players roll 22 on initiative.
  • A free round. Thalia opens with Entangle on a sleeping target — Strength save at disadvantage, 14, failed — so it spends the first round restrained while the whole party attacks with advantage. Fenric opens with a hit and a crit (13, then 22 damage) and then misses with a 14 — which is how the table learns its AC needs a 15. Silithane Bladesongs in with Booming Blade and a silvered short sword.
  • The breath. Freed on its second action, it rears halfway between a snake and a worm and breathes a cone of black sinew, acid and dark magic over five characters. The GM offers a choice: a Dexterity save for all-or-nothing, or a Constitution save to weather it, reducing the damage by whatever you roll. Fenric establishes it counts as magical (so he has advantage), rolls a 20 on Dex, and takes nothing; the rest take 32 necrotic minus their save. Its follow-up shuffle toward Thalia triggers Silithane's Booming Blade.
  • Consume into the Ribcage. It opens the turn with a tail swipe that hits Lash for 17 bludgeoning, then commits the rest of it to this: it rears up, its ribs click open one at a time, and it scoops Silithane up to interlock them and blend him. DC 18 Strength; Silithane has a –1, rolls 17, and burns Heroic Inspiration to make it — pushing one rib aside and falling out of the hole as the cage snaps shut. 24 piercing instead of a doubled 86.
  • Bonestorm. Its signature: it noodles almost vertical and gyrates, and every bone buried in the chamber tears free and spins counter-clockwise through the room. Dexterity save, with cumulative thresholds — under 30: 4 bludgeoning; under 25: 13 more; under 20: knocked prone and 18 more; under 15: restrained under bone rubble; under 10: a great deal of damage; under 5: lifted into the cyclone and slammed into a wall; under 0: the GM has simply written the word "death." Everyone is under 25, Fenric and Lash under 20, and Lash goes down. Roughly 40 damage to each of them by the GM's later reckoning — 17 for everyone, 35 for Fenric and Lash. (Lash's new gauntlets give advantage against being knocked prone, but this is a failed save on a spell, not a check.)
  • Rescue and triage. Thalia whips Lash 10 feet out of the storm's radius without triggering the whip's thorns. Fenric, prone, crawls 5 feet to pour a healing potion into Salamandine (3 HP — which saves him two death saves later) and then stands. Downed, Lash rolls one death-save success and spends her turn drinking her last actual healing potion.
  • Refusing to die. Magra's crit punches clean through its spinal column and everyone in the room feels it die — and then it makes a Constitution save to keep going, at DC 5 it cannot fail. "The feeling you have right now is the feeling that the guy who stabbed it through the head must have felt when he was like, I've got it — and then it killed him." Jex double-crits into a creature at 1 hit point, triggering DC 10 (automatic) and DC 15 (passed).
  • Killed by a sword its wielder no longer had. On its final turn, Silithane's own past self opens a portal and takes back the Shadow Blade — the GM's running gag paid off exactly on schedule — and in the same beat its tail hits Silithane for 27 and drops him. It bites Salamandine for 18, then starts crawling for Jex; Fenric takes the opportunity attack, and the Booming Blade already sheathing the creature triggers on the movement. Its caster is Silithane, lying unconscious on the floor — the GM chews over whether "someone's got to be there to boom it" and rules that it persists. DC 20, the only save it could still fail. It fails, and crumples into the water.
  • Afterwards. Roughly 700 hit points and damage reductions taking piercing hardest (the archers reverse-engineer it at a third to a half), carved through in five rounds. The GM: "I thought that dragon was going to be way worse than it was." For scale, he notes a Player's Handbook dragon has about 210 and would have died in a round.
• No other combat. The mine's remaining shades are passive; the two ethereal spiders from Session 53 are still unfought, as is the mining camp above.

NPCs & Factions

• Dr. Xiao Li (travelling with the party) — sends Magra out in front ("I think it is pertinent that you lead"), reads the miners' map and immediately places her own team after the fire from its omissions, declines the party's offer of the mine's abandoned supplies, and waits at the top of the dragon pit visibly anxious for people she has known two days. Her general meeting happened off-screen; she has named a deputy and is leaving for a couple of weeks to meet the resistance in person. On dragons she is out of her depth and says so — "I'm not religious and I don't go north" — and resolves to find a dragonologist at the next town with scholars in it.
• Polos (the plus-one) — the facility's friendly door-greeter from Session 52 is the one scientist travelling out with Dr. Lee, not the waterway-obsessed Marge. Nervous in the tunnels, grateful when Thalia takes the rear so he isn't last in the line, and the man who supplies the name "the Dragon War" for Laewendas's dragon-slaying propaganda — which prompts Lash to ask why an Acropolis man knows Rivalon's talking points.
• Salamandine (levelled) — takes a bite for 18 near the end of the fight, saved from two death saves by the potion Fenric crawled over to give him. At the long rest Lash spends her level-8 feat entirely on him (+4 damage, +3 AC, +3 saves, 50 max HP) and the GM finally gives him a way to heal himself on a long rest — after a lifetime of never being hurt, he has spent a couple of months getting beaten up and is learning to lick his wounds.
• Laewendas (referenced) — the propaganda that she rode a dragon and killed the rest of them gets a formal name from Polos: the Dragon War. It joins The Gravekeeper's warning that anyone who brings the Dragon Wars up is talking nonsense — a story told well beyond Rivalon's borders.
• Eldrich the Elder (the destination) — still at the Menagoles where the party left him. The whole plan now runs to him: out the north tunnel, over the mountain, and back with a facility manager who wants to look the resistance in the eye before she trusts seventeen lives to it.

Locations

• The Menagoles Mines (finished) — the last two rooms on the miners' own map fall this session: the supply store to the north (untouched by the fire, a year of rotted perishables, everything a mining crew could want, and one crate emptied of gauntlets) and the living quarters to the south-east — a drilled egg-shaped chamber with a domed roof, sunken fire pits, triple bunks and personal-effects chests, plus a hobby side-dig where a miner buried himself. The party's own digging brings that passage down permanently, sealing the miner, his shade and the map's last unknown. The mine's deep is now mapped end to end, with only the camp above and the two ethereal spiders left in it.
• The Foredweller Research Facility (rested in) — the facility's second floor is opened to the party for the first time: sleeping, bathing and showering quarters up a ladder, with hot water piped from the fire-machines below. Not mapped, because there is nothing up there to run around in. The lab also serves as a field hospital on the way through, and hosts the party's first long rest in about a day and a half.
• The bone dragon's lair (cleared) — reached again through the flooded crawl and the stair of 15-to-20-ft ledges, roughly a 100-ft climb back out. Behind the fight, past where Lash first came down her rope, are mushrooms and greenery growing around a big still pool; the 220-ft shaft above is the top of the hole, not a stop on the way further down. The dragon's bones are left where they fell, mostly in the water.

Loot, Items & Rewards

• Gravity Gauntlets (new — Lash) — high-quality mining gauntlets with processed white golem-crystal set into the backs of the hands. Choose a point; every creature within 20 feet of it is dragged to that point — no save, no check, and no opportunity attacks, since the movement is involuntary. Post-session errata: 200-ft range (was unlimited), no targets larger than the 20-ft square, and fall damage applies instantly. Recovered from the crushed miner who died wearing them in a tunnel he wasn't supposed to be digging. Also grant advantage against being knocked prone.
• +2 dragon-slaying short sword (claimed — Magra) — finally freed from the dragon's skull, not by drawing it but by tearing the skull off it. Good weighting; nobody else in the party is strong enough to take it off her. Valued at roughly 4,000 gold.
• +3 dragon-slaying arrow (new — Jex) — the ammunition buried where the dragon's heart would have been, and one of only two things from its first death that survived the centuries. +3 that can be forced onto any target, double damage against dragons, and 10 uses before the magic wanes — but it has to be physically recovered after every shot. A d2 decided it was an arrow rather than a bolt; Lash could reforge it into a bolt after five uses so Magra gets the other five.
• Miner's Expedition Journal (new) — the mine crew's notes and their full map of the tunnels, including the rooms they collapsed on purpose and the ones they marked don't. It records the dragon room but nothing past it, because the two digs that reached it are what caused the fire.
• Two healer's kits, a crowbar, oil flasks and pitons — taken from the supply store, with six more kits left behind.
• Left behind: up to 70 dragon teeth (all damaged, the bone too far gone to be worth carrying, unlike the sun-dried Toxico ones), the pooled black ichor it breathed (touching it hurts), and ~20 lbs of Lash's ore, dropped for weight.
• Level 8. The dragon was the pip the party had been one short of since Session 51. ASIs across the board, plus Mage Slayer (Fenric, with a free ASI point for taking the older version), Advanced Beast Training (Lash, spent entirely on Salamandine), +2 Constitution (Magra), and a new tier of spell slots (Silithane).

Decisions & Open Threads

• The mine is done; the way out is the north tunnel. The party will not go back up its own lift into the mining camp, which has had two days to notice them. It will cross the mountain through the scientists' north tunnel instead — dug a year ago, unused since, and long enough (~60 miles) that the GM has flatly promised something has moved in. Lash's logic: an unknown squatter beats a garrison that is expecting you.
• Dr. Xiao Li and Polos are coming. Her meeting is held, her deputy is named, and she is out of the facility for a couple of weeks to meet Eldrich the Elder and decide whether seventeen lives can be handed to the Reclamation. Nobody has yet told her what the plan for the green room actually is, because there still isn't one.
• The two "unopened" deep doors are not a mystery. The scientists can open them and choose not to; one is simply the edge of the mapped world and runs ~60 miles to a sister facility. Nothing is hidden behind them that the team knows of. The Long Walk is now the only real unknown in that direction.
• Two fights left in the mountain, both skipped. The two ethereal spiders in the flooded water tunnels and the boss of the mining camp above (the noble is trivial; the Queensguard is the threat) are still there, still worth pips, and the party is walking away from both.
• The gauntlets are a solved problem waiting for a target. A no-save 20-ft pull with no attack roll, in the hands of a character whose turns were mostly Help and dodge. The table has already sketched the cliff, the water, the whip and — the GM's own pick — vacuuming a 20-ft radius into Thalia's hat.
• Silithane is, mechanically, a dragon. A dragon-slaying arrow doubled its damage on him. Whatever the table has been joking about for months now has a ruling behind it.
• The Dragon War. Laewendas is said to have flown a dragon and killed every other dragon in the world; Polos knows the name of the story from the far side of the sea. Dr. Xiao Li intends to find someone who studies dragons and ask. The Gravekeeper already warned the party that anyone who talks about the Dragon Wars is lying.
• The Wum guy needs rescuing, not finding. The artisan who can fuse two duplicate items into one better item — the GM's open homage to an old game he loves — turns out to be a captive. The party had been treating him as a person to locate; he is a person to break out.
• Carryover: the report owed to Eldrich the Elder on the mine disaster (the actual job); the strike on Knucklebones at Lambert's Crossing; the mine's underwater city; the captive alchemist Snuffles and the sleeping angelborn; the fifty-plus waiting dead; Thalia's undelivered druid tomes; the Grey Man; the held soul candles, cursed mask and two grafting-gland symbiotes; Lash's unforged crystal-golem core; the party's Rosetta Stone, still unmentioned to a facility of translators; Jex's legal non-existence; the imprisoned Caressa; and the eventual siege of Cathalon.
• Roster. Full table: Fenric (Fantom), Thalia (Cara), Lash (Kadie), Jex (Nat), Magra (Mia) and Silithane (Johan), with Salamandine and the re-summoned bat. Neko has no active PC (Valmora left in Session 44); Ashlyn's player and Draak remain away. Now level 8.

Memorable Moments

• "It's not about pulling the sword from the skull. It's about pulling the skull from the sword." Silithane heaving uselessly at a submerged dragon's head, and Magra solving it in one sentence by treating the skull as the thing that needs moving.
• Two natural ones, by request. Silithane rolling a 1 to pull the arrow out, and Magra spending her reroll reaction on him purely because it might be funny — and it comes up 1 again. The GM, defeated: "that is my least favourite feature anyone has ever had in any game I've ever seen in my life." Then the arrow goes through Silithane for double damage, because he's a dragon.
• Rib bone, clavicle, skull, tooth, metal gauntlet. Lash shoulder-deep in a collapsing hole, identifying a dead miner by touch on the way to his gloves, and Silithane hauling her out by the ankles as the ceiling comes down on the ghost.
• Killed by an absent man's sword. The dragon at 1 hit point, refusing three saves to die, dropping Silithane with its tail in the same instant his past self stole his weapon back — and then dying to the Booming Blade he'd left on it, while unconscious, as it crawled toward Jex.
• The sun, 20 feet at a time. The table realising the gauntlets could be aimed at the sun, Jex calculating 67 million years to boil the world, and the GM patiently explaining that you don't have to bring it all the way in — only out of the Goldilocks zone.
• "Wait, that was my bone." The long rest spent pulling bone shrapnel out of each other and occasionally having to put a piece back.
• What is the difference between a hole, a pit, a shaft and an oubliette? Five minutes of genuine taxonomy, arrived at via Thalia rating Lash's recklessness "an 8 if a hole was involved" on a five-point scale, a verdict Lash accepts — she'll go 200 feet down, but not into instant death, and the elevator shaft was too flat and smooth to count.
• Beast Boxcar. The GM discovering, in his own homebrew, that among five serious companion feats he once wrote one that simply teaches your pet to drive a train — and spending several minutes trying to sell it. "You don't know the power of a train yet."

SUMMARY: The party clears the mine's last two rooms — finding gravity gauntlets in a collapsed hobby-dig — then goes back down the flooded crawl and kills the ~700 HP bone dragon in five rounds (Entangle opener, a ribcage swallow Silithane escapes, a Bonestorm that drops Lash, and a final Booming Blade left by an unconscious Silithane), claiming the +2 dragon-slaying short sword for Magra and a +3 dragon-slaying arrow for Jex; a long rest in the scientists' quarters takes them to level 8, and they set out through the north tunnel for Eldrich with Dr. Xiao Li and Polos in tow.