OSR: Veinscrawl Session 11 & 12

Last session, the party fought a whale and a vampire, lost the goblins, and went slightly mad.

The party consists of: Cazael the spiderling fighter. Fears magic, prefers a good sword and a simple plan.
Bill the wormling Orthodox Wizard. Has antlers, telekinesis, permanent wizard vision, inability to sleep, magic not-dying amulet, etc. Generally considered a liability.
Swainson the Garden Wizard. Formerly a hawkling, currently a dryad.
Christen Bell the weasel-ling Bell Exorcist. Starting to think this whole underground thing was a bad idea.
Tuck the Flealing Summoner. Suspicious but loyal.

The map has grown so complex that the map-making player has split it into 2 files. Here's the original map (up to Session 8).

 And here's session 9, 10, 11, and 12.

Starting with "The Ambassagater"...

1. The party, recovering from their hallucinations, found themselves on the edge of a great underground chemical lake. They negotiated passage across on slate skiff-boats piloted by myconids.

2. At a fungal village / trading port, the PCs finally encountered something like a civilization. Protected by the myconids, traders from many underground states could meet in relative safety in the centre of the fungid valley. The village contained the semi-permanent embassy of a fungal ambassodile, a two-minded creature full of secrets and schemes. It also contained a Drow silk-merchant.

3. Bill negotiated with the mysterious elf to learn new spells. Tuck, offended by the Drow's aloof and insulting nature, hurled insults of his own. The Drow made most of Tuck's organs fall out. Tuck, annoyed by this, gathered up his still-functional innards and asked the Drow to "fix it". The Drow did. Tuck now loved the Drow. He literally couldn't think badly of them.

4. Meanwhile, Cazael and the rest of the party met with the fungal ambassodile. The strangely charming creature asked them, as independent operatives, to go and sort out a minor problem with a giant magical creature in a lake. If they could kill the creature, they'd earn vast rewards, including a map to the surface.

5. The party also recruited a young woman, Alice, and a mysterious goat, Tom.

6. Their route to the lake passed through the Slime Vortex, a funnel-shaped cave full of spinning slimes. Water flowing into the channel was filtered by the rotating mass of slimes. It was a miracle of nature and a massive obstacle to travel. It was also an excellent source of gold; all the inedible metals sunk to the bottom of the funnel.

7. The gold was far too tempting for Tom the Goat and Bill the Wormling. Together, they descended into the funnel, dodging slimes the whole way. Unfortunately for them, the pool at the bottom of the cave wasn't water at all, but another transparent slime. They were both badly bludgeoned and partially digested.

8. Klaus used his sorcerous powers to part the slimes, altering the funnel's geometry temporarily and allowing for the rescue of Bill, the goat, and a small amount of gold.

9. Tom the goat, who was "really weird", everyone agreed, was in a semi-permanent coma. Alice, his keeper and apprentice witch, decided to take matters into her own hands.

10. After several more adventures, the party finally found the gigantic underground lake at the heart of the fungid valley. They decided to lure the "magic beast" in the lake to shore using a magic battery - stolen from a dEr0 earthquake machine - as bait. 

11. The plan worked, and a horrible insect, with a shell made entirely of magic weapons, lurched from the lake to savage the group. The party's plan hadn't extended beyond luring the beast closer. They immediately panicked.

12. Christen Bell and Swainson were crushed by the beast's magic shell. Mangled beyond recognition, they were left to die on the rocky shore as Cazael and Bill tried to fight the creature. Alice turned into a strange rubbery bird and flew away, shouting "Fuck this, I'm out!". She stopped just long enough to drop the magic battery onto the back of the giant beast.

13. Cazael set the magic battery on fire and, briefly, drove the caddis-fly-thing into the lake. Bill, meanwhile, attempted a radical healing procedure for his two "mostly dead" friends. Sure, Swainson and Christen Bell were dead in the medical sense, but possibly not in the wizardly sense. He stabbed them both with his dagger of roiling polymorph.

14. Christen Bell turned into an octopus and stayed there. Unable to live out of the water, she sadly lurched into the lake.

15. Swainson, on the other hand, polymorphed into a ravenous shadow, then a cave giant. Still disoriented by lurching from splintery death into gigantic life, she spotted the caddis-fly monster charging towards shore. She struck the creature with a mighty blow, tore it apart, and scattered magical implements and gold all over the shore.

16. The dagger was, unfortunately, roiling polymorph. Swainson polymorphed from a giant to a panther, a rhino, a mummy, a brass dragon, a cockatrice, a giant (again!), a squid, a gorilla, and finally, after over an hour of screaming and flopping from form to form, stabilized as a lamassu. While not ideal, a lamassu was hardly the worst thing to be. At least Swainson could speak and move and even cast spells; her new cow-sphinx-lion form would do.

17. With her mind fading fast, octopus-Christen Bell decided to end her life by magic sword. She chopped herself into neat cubes and faded away.

18. Encumbered with thousands of gold pieces and dozens of magic swords, the surviving members of the party lurched away from the magically contaminated lake, leaving entire drifts of swords and gold behind.

Would their hasty actions result in underground warfare? What was the ambassodile's plan? Could they use Swainson's new lamassu powers to escape to the surface or was her mind too badly scrambled by her many transformations?

Find out next time.