The Foe Gallery
Unidentified Past Monsters Mathew has Battled!
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We spent another day exploring the grounds around the ruined mansion. About mid-afternoon, we found a rock strewn field and a hulking stone statue of Cthulhu. It radiated a strong, evil magic. Despite Mathew's reluctance, I convinced him to make a camp there for the night so that we could intercept whatever evil the statue was generating. As the fire leapt and danced, its shadows seemed to imbue the statue with a twitching, wriggling life. Mathew was so frightened he seemed ready to soil himself, but he remained on watch.
Unfortunately, as the night wore on, he became distracted by posting to Facebook and waiting for the number of fans on the Helm fan page to cross 6,000. By the time it had, he was oblivious to the fact that we were surrounded by a large number of hideous, octopus-like spiders. They were quite large, two and a half to three feet high and about six feet around when the leg/tentacles were taken into account. The things sprang on Mathew. He managed to throw the first one into the fire, which went out, and then he fled like a coward.
The creatures pursued him and eventually pounced upon him again just short of the tree line of the nearby woods. Then, a great battle ensued. Mathew acquitted himself well, although he screamed like a child through most of the fight. His most successful strategy was to set the creatures alight with his flaming sword or to hack their legs from under them. No individual creature was particularly formidable, but there were quite a number of them and they did have fairly grotesque mandibles, dripping with stinking venom.
We finished the last of them off as the sky was beginning to blush with dawn's light. At that point, we toppled the Cthulhu statue in an attempt to shatter it, but it seemed protected by dark magic and did not break. Mathew was going to hit it with his sword, but I informed him that hitting stone statues with one's blade is an excellent way to break the blade. We decided to go and buy a sledge hammer, then return to destroy the statue after lunch and a little sore-needed rest.
