Osric: Scouting the surface around Greenwood? (13)

Having been beat to within inches of our collective lives by the fury of the duergar raiding party, we escape under the heavy fog cover create by Jenks pyrotechnic spell cast on the circle of flame. Being the lightest on his feet in the wilderness, Jenks (druid), manages to locate a possible cave entrance mostly hidden by snow, and leads
the party there.

The gnomes head in first to investigate and find 2 skeletons at a fire, with knifes buried in one another. It appears to be a set of bandits who were disagreeing over the sac of gold between them. Recognizing this as a put up job by the GM to activate some vengeful spirits, we ignore the treasure as we are brutally hurt and make camp further back. Archon the priest is encouraged to say some words to thank these bodies for sharing their space.

Overnight we attacked by something....I believe it's more wolves (I've forgotten). They are dealt with fairly handily as Jenks has some good animal spells. The second attack by owlbears, summoned by the fresh meat in the area is a bit more battering. We are stuck in a cave with a pile of corpses at the entrance, short on spells (no one got a good sleep) and totally hurt. Fantastic level of attrition delivered by our GM.

We head out the following day to investigate the bits of smoke and steam seen rising from the hills around Greenwood. Hoping to find some other paths into the dungeon below....or better yet, use them to drop some horrible revenge on our enemies. The 3 of them are: 1/. likely a forge. 2/. probably a dragon.... regular puffs of smoke, smelling of sulphur. Also a sense of terror when standing in the smoke. This smoke hole is covered by a gravelly landslide; we're not likely to get through here. 3/.I forget...I think it ended up being the hole we escaped from and there was some confusion from the DM.

We investigate the possibility of routing a river to flood the complex. Unfortunately the river has cut into the land, definitely below the ground level where the holes are located. It would require some pretty serious engineering project. In the meantime we find some more trouble....

A floating skull is spotted tailing us. It's a bit challenging to see as it's a neutral tone, no heat is emitted, and it's trailing us in the underbrush. Dan the fighter waves at it and is spitted with magic missiles for his trouble. The skull peels off and escapes.

A Dwarven (hill dwarf) mausoleum found, and we try to excavate the doorway (A gravelly slide has covered most of the building except for the roof). Mr Floating skull shows up with a gaggle of skellies and zombies in tow.  We hide on high ground and Archon turns a batch of undead. The tough ascent up the gravel impedes the undead and we mostly beat them up.....but once again the skull spits some of our team with magic missiles. It's all looking a little dicey that we are going to lose some party members soon. We decide to close up the mausoleum, so we don't get trapped in there and to prevent undead access, and move on towards the river.

We can't decide if the skull is a familiar or a demi-liche. As a player if I knew I could venture a guess, but I try not to munchin out and read the monster descriptions.....so I have no idea except it's either bad, or REALLY bad.

Down by the river we are attacked again (by the previously turned undead), this time without benefit of terrain. The remnants rush us as the skull moves in and begins to launch magic missile salvos. Eventually we manage to expode the skull (with arrow fire) and defeat the skellies. Jane went down, barely kept alive, and we are back to being barely alive.