Delve 6: Silly Snakes, Life is for People!

Our Heroes, afraid that success had made them forget their roots and where they came from, return to basics and assault a Pit of Cultish Despair!

Encounter 16: Herein, Our Heroes Yawn at Yuan-Ti

Barging down the stairs, Saribke and Mia are startled to discover a snake pit that has the temerity to challenge their manifest ownership of anything beneath street level! Using grenades of alchemical fire, Mia makes kebab sans stick of half the enemy, while Saribke inserts the the skewer into those who remain. After a quick overwhelming assault, Our Heroes emerge victorious, and push deeper into the dungoen.

Result: Two-turn kill. Lots and lots of minions get blown to smithereens by blast damage, and making Mia take Alchemy is really paying off. No loot, but very little damage.

Encounter 17: Coils and Coils of Fun

The next chamber reveals four enormous snakes coiled around pillars in a dank, moss-ridden hall. Recognizing immediately that half of them are constrictors and the other two are vipers, Saribke does the arithmatic and discerns that this could be very, very bad for Our Heroes, and ushers Mia toward a corner and readies attack actions to defend against snakes coming up and encircling them like the belts they aren't. When the snakes uncoil and... leap?... into combat, what ensues is a brutal fight where Saribke spends half the time being crushed to death while Mia throws explosions near (although sometimes at) Saribke and his serpentine captor. In the end however, Our Heroes succeed in defeating the glorified shoelaces, although Saribke came out perhaps a foot taller and a bit skinnier.

Result: Standard fight, 8 healing surges used total. Mia and Saribke root about the room and find 2 rubies. Our heroes push into the final chamber.

Encounter 18: Actually Being a Reptile Is Better Than Just Looking Like One

The next room is a large hall with a sunken, watery floor, and Yuan-Ti cavort happily in the shallows, with a hierophant doing something humbly and peacefully at an altar. Butterflies and motes of light dance in columns of soft warm light, and a harp might be heard playing. Tired of these evil shenanigans, Mia lobs fiery Graecian death on these vermin, and Saribke forcibly introduces the others to the business end of a hostile spearhead takeover. The hierophant, horrified at seeing his brethren murdered, makes a quite moving speech of indictment against his assailants and their violent, intolerant ways. Thankfully for the psyche of Our Heroes, it came out as "sssszzzsszszszsSSZsZszszs", and the hierophant fell dead face down into the muck, but not before finishing a last invocation...

From the shadowy dark corners of the room, a crocodile the size of a bus emerges to avenge the death of the snake that lovingly raised it from a tadpole... or something. It is unknown to this day whose eyes grew wider at that moment, Mia's or Saribke's, for no calipers were on hand, but the result was clear: a long encounter where Saribke and Mia ran like wimps all around the room taking potshots at the crocodile until it relented and escaped out into the swamp after a half hour of eating chunks of Our Heroes.

Result: Based on the encounter description, I would have expected the Yuan-Ti to be the bulk of the time, but they went down in three relatively easy rounds. Instead, the Crocodile was a ridiculous beast. Saribke, fleeing the whole time, still managed to be halfway inside the crocodile's mouth half of the time: the crocodile's armor was so thick that Saribke got clobbered and salivated on whenever he tried to pierce it, so Mia basically played at ranged demolition for no less than 12 turns before the croc peaced out. Both come out ragged and torn, but they level up and loot the Yuan-Ti Orphanage Charity Fund for a solid 3000gp.