On the first day out, the party crested a rise to find a group of gnollish archers cresting a facing rise; the valley in between sported your basic cave mouth. The party raced across and dispatched the gnolls; a troll heard the noise and poked its head out of the cave to take a look, and it was quickly downed as well. (The gnolls were carrying lots of fire-producers, so they were apparently there to take out the troll and take over its cave.) The troll's mate made some inquiry from within and didn't seem anxious to come out when it got no reply, but the party made cute little noises outside and pissed it off, so it eventually charged out and died too.
The next day, the party dispatched some owlbear constructs and reclaimed Pepper from the skirmishers. The skirmishers told the party that undead activity in the area had been increasing, and there'd been sightings of a wight riding around on a nightmare. Silvana noted that roaming free-willed undead were rather unusual for the Death Temple, and Ganeth speculated that there may have been a full-fledged split in the Death Temple, with the traditional priests like Delrina on one side and Kharnzeel on the other. And if Kharnzeel's side has found a new patron (such as the big A), that would explain why Kharnzeel doesn't seem to have been slowed down by losing those priestly abilities he's supposed to have lost -- he wouldn't have lost them at all. Since the party was going to need some sort of cover to keep watchers from figuring out why they were there and stopping all that nice evil bloodwood from going away, they decided that stomping on the undead population would make a mighty fine diversion.
And on the following day, the party set up camp in the western part of Lifeblood.
The basic plan ran thus: Rillohar, Silvana, and Stealth (via the spell-swapping armor) would take as many Age Plant spells as they could muster (four between them) and slip off (using poly self for the grey elves and a shapechange to stag form for Rillohar) to plant the anchor trees (a grove at each node, to get redundancy in case the beetles came by and ate some of the trees) and grow them each morning (in a random pattern to keep the circle from being obvious too early in the proceedings). Two 12th level priests from the grey elven forest would also be transporting in via plants each morning to handle another ten nodes (and transporting back out when they were done). After the planting, the party would regroup for a full day's adventuring. (Fortunately for the humans, the wood elves didn't seem to be patrolling that far; fortunately for everyone, either PD or the Lifeblood entity has confined Rillathorn in the Bloodheart.) Campers, alas, would have to settle for a Leomund's Tiny Hut from G, since the shelter spell slots were being used for the aging and polymorphing.
The first day's planting went uneventfully, and the rangers set about looking for interesting tracks to follow. The tracks they found all disappeared at a tree, which was found to contain a plant door; apparently the Easterners were keeping their undead in plant doors during the day to keep them out of sight. So Silvana opened the plant door, stuck in her shield, and fired off a sunburst. The sixty zombies that were "stacked like firewood" inside never knew what hit them (not that zombies are capable of knowing things anyway); the wight and the Death Master (complete with life-sensing goggles) woke up pissed, and Silvana shut the door.
A short combat followed, in which the wight and the Death Master were taken out, and the eight zombies the Death Master had re-reanimated were re-deanimated. Pepper was drained a level by the wight; luckily these levels return at a rate of one per day of self-training.
The party then came up with a somewhat complicated plan to stake out the plant door and see who came to investigate when the undead didn't make their rounds that night. Unfortunately, nobody showed before the plant door expired, and the party headed off to camp. That night and the following 24 hours were encounter-free; more planting happened and Pepper successfully retrained.
After the third day of planting, the party came upon a clearing with what looked like a pile of green gems and plant material in the center. They skirted around it and suddenly found themselves surrounded by a dozen needlemen -- and since Pepper's danger sense didn't go off until the last second, they had to have simply appeared rather than moving in on them. The needlemen were a little special: Each thorn that hit drained a point of dexterity (with a save to avoid the effect). But they still took triple damage from "directed spell effects" and the party got them anyway (except for the two who were scared off by Beeel's headband).
As the party members got free of the needlemen, they moved on to the central mound to stop it from creating more baddies. Said mound turned out to be a double-hit-dice shambling mound with all the usual resistances and immunities (so that's 20HD and half damage from most of the known universe), and it really disliked elves, attacking them in preference to anyone else (i.e., Beeel). Rillohar refused to engage the creature, on the theory that it might be some druid's experiment, but after Thorongil, Ganeth, and Stealth were all drowning inside the mound, he eventually helped defeat it.
Having realized that he wasn't strong enough to break free of the mound, Ganeth had instead started swimming through the muck grabbing for vitals (to see the effect of having someone stuff a creature's organs into an extradimensional space), and he emerged holding what looked like a melon-sized gem-encrusted kiwi. Rillohar had to concede that this was not natural but also refused to let the gems go to the yumyum pile until he could make inquiries among the druids. (To everyone else, it seemed fairly obvious that some Eastern priests with skill in plant magic were spiking Lifeblood with anti-elf creations.) So Rillohar took custody of the gems and the party moved on. They didn't find anything else of interest, so they camped for the night.
During the night, the party was attacked a group of bar-lgura, and a merry game of grab the gem bag was eventually won by Beeel. (There was also a spectral force of a vrock trying to do a dance of ruin with its mirror images, but nobody bought it.) After the demonic monkeys were no more, Silvana detected a small invisible black bird observing the party from a distance. She went out and got off a beautiful 20-point backstab on it. It turned, looked at her, and started regenerating. She ran back to the party.
After completely healing in four rounds, the bird flew in to chat with the party. It claimed that the party was safe where it was, said some other stuff that wasn't particularly memorable, and flew off. The party left to find a new campsite.
After the party settled in again and some of the party got back to sleep, the guards saw a huge (roughly creeping doom scale) carpet of giant centipedes headed their way. They woke the party, and everyone ran away.
Realizing that they were being followed and had no good way of tracking their pursuers themselves, Silvana burned her big spell and called for some pixie/tixie-like woodland creature. Shortly afterward, a two-foot tool green humanoid covered with spiky growth bounded out of a nearby tree, and so the party met "Forest Lord", enthusiastic kizaz extraordinaire. Among the kizaz's cool abilities were creating plant doors three times per day, so he made one for the party to camp in and set of in pursuit of the pursuit. Some time later, he returned with the black bird, who was in a head lock and patiently enduring an unending series of noogies. (Unfortunately, it could regen faster than the kizaz could damage it.)
The kizaz got rid of the bird in the morning; while he was gone, the higher-level grey elves appeared and took the gems back to Plant Dude (aborting their planting for the day). After Forest Lord returned, the low-level planting brigade did get their seeds in the ground; to distract the kizaz while they slipped out, Ganeth and Beeel asked its advice on the intricacies of forest survival.
- Forest Lord:
- "Don't eat any mushrooms. Don't eat bugs, especially bright-colored ones. Don't get pricked by thorns. Don't let the bugs sting you. Don't get strangled by vines. Don't wake the bears. Don't talk to trolls. Don't hunt unicorns. Don't smell the flowers. And don't listen to the faerie folk."
After the planting, Rillohar communed with nature to get a better sense of what was around. No demons or similar nastiness were reported, so the bird must have returned whence it came after its release. There were some undead off to the north and east, and a bunch of elves seemed to be huddled in plant doors near the ring of anchor trees. One other plant door was a short distance north. And there was apparently a spider sitting about 100 feet away.
The party figured that if they hadn't detected a spider observing them that closely, there wasn't much they could do to it (and they weren't anxious to enter another round of tit-for-tat with Rakni), so they headed off for the lone plant door, hoping to hose the evil plant priest during its down time. The area was surrounded by an impassible tangled growth; the kizaz (to whom no plant is impassible) went in a-scouting and reported that there was a clearing in the center and a lone tree in the clearing. Find traps showed magical traps in the clearing; Stealth lobbed in a dispel magic and got the traps but not the plant door.
Forest Lord created two passages, side-by-side, through the growth for the final assault. Once the party reached the clearing, Silvana searched for the plant door but couldn't find it, so the kizaz just created a new one; Silvana and Pepper charged in for the stoneskin-ignoring flame blade backstab, and the battle began. We didn't learn much about the priest, but since she lobbed a figurine of a black pudding at Silvana, Pepper, and G before word of recalling home, there may be a Juiblex connection somewhere. Her bodyguard, a wood elf with a barbed spear and arrows of wounding, escaped the tree and the pudding but was taken out by Beeel, Thorongil, and Rillohar outside. (The inside folks were actually hoping to escape outside as well rather than take on the pudding on their lonesomes, but they ended up killing the pudding [largely defensively with Silvana's fire shield] before G was able to make a successful tumbling check.) Among the items the fighter left behind were a Helibane sleeping bag that heals its occupant 2 hp during a night's rest and a shield that does some sort of hypnosis or forgetting.
A few more days of planting went uneventfully, and further communes with nature showed that all the undead had been pulled out of the area. (Looks like the party's first strike greatly impressed the opposition.) The spider observer also departed. So all that was left was to get the wood elves to stop straddling the perimeter.
When the party went to talk to the wood elves, they learned from a priest called Bloodrain that there was a prophecy that they'd be saved when Thornwind returned to the center. Rillathorn had left instructions that Thornwind was to be brought to the center and than his "devious mate" was not to be trusted. (By the way, it looks like Rillathorn has gone and sacrificed her fellow high-level priests again. And it wouldn't surprise me if she told the wood elves to camp along the perimeter just to draw Stealth and Silvana in.) But Madam Devious was eventually able to convince the wood elves that Lifeblood was going down and they could either retreat deeper in and survive or stay out and face the beetles, undead, needlemen, shambling mounds, and who-knows-what-else that've moved into the neighborhood, and either way Stealth wasn't spending the rest of his days with Rillathorn. So the wood elves moved in and the party moved on.
The last anchor trees were grown on 1824PK. The party left Lifeblood late that morning, encountered some more owlbear constructs, and made their way back to the army. On 1827PK (AK 594/4/28), the heart of Lifeblood was gone.