missizzy

Eight sessions into our Call of the Netherdeep adventure, it finally happened. Someone got killed. And it ended up being a permadeath as well.We'd gone into the Betrayer's Rise, having been hired by a power-hungry elf named Aloysia who gave us a lot of good information and has even been pretty useful with her wizard spells against the monsters, but it very much not a nice person or boss. After finding a menacing possible entrance to a temple to Torog, looking into the side-chamber first, and having to battle a pair of powerful flaming skulls and a scary squid-creature, we decided to block the chamber up and take a long rest, during which the DM had the one keeping watch roll on the random encounter table for the next morning until one of us rolled low-which I did on the second watch. I'm actually not feeling too much guilt over that, though; you really don't feel it as much when rolling consists of clicking on something on a compute screen.
The DM had already commented on the scariness of said encounter table, and he was right to. I'd rolled for a trio of big life-sucking bugs, plus a smaller one, though Aloysia managed to catch them with a surprise fireball that killed the latter before the encounter proper began. First there was their ability to knock us out for ten minutes if we failed a constitution save. Then, the first one to go attacked our bugbear monk, and critted. And rolled high enough that he suffered necrotic damage higher than his hit point total-and when their necrotic damage drained said total. The DM, apologetic but also laughing with incredulity, declared him dead.
At that point we briefly wondered if we were all dead. But very thankfully all but one of us passed the constitution save, and were declared immune to the effect for the rest of the day, and none of the other bugs managed quite so bad a hit on anything besides the druid's fire spirit (they weren't very smart, the DM noted) before we killed them. But we still had our dead character. The druid, who'd delayed getting a diamond for Revivify, had 15 seconds to ask if anyone had one, and I told Aloysia we had the gold for one, but she didn't carry such a thing. The monk was actually consecuted, and while I suspect a Revivify might have worked anyway, when we couldn't do one, the cleric in the camp hospital declared his soul had probably already been taken by the Luxon. There was a speech about how he actually might not be reborn for even a century, which is was kind of embarrassing for Schist to not know, since she has a sister undergoing anamnesis, but as a young drow, she's holding out hope of maybe seeing her friend again someday, long after this adventure is over. We gave him a good ceremonial procession to the crematorium.
He'd also been the one wearing Alyxian's necklace from the cove, and at this point I had Schist take it, if only because it increases AC and hers is the lowest. One of the others commented it was appropriate anyway, since she'd been the one with the most knowledge of Vestiges and such. I do like her having it, but not as a result of this. It even makes her feel like a bit of a heroine, though at this moment in time, she herself feels much more like a very scared farmgirl, too far away from her home and her family.
The monk's player apparently worked on his new character overnight, and posted a character sheet this morning which he described as "minmaxed as fuck - aka fuck you matt mercer." We'll presumably run into him and recruit him in the morning; we do not want to go back into those caves without him.