first salamander duel

[cellio]

May 2 (Monday)

I'm depressed. We entered the crucible to fight the duel, and a couple minutes later we had lost, badly. If they had been trying to hurt us we'd all be dead now. This is not a good sign for the future. Hamid seems certain of this as well.

When the fight was over, I asked for a rematch or, if that would not be permitted, a one-on-one fight, their champion versus ours. Farooq agreed that we could fight them again tomorrow, but we'll obviously have to improve our tactics if that is to do any good. They then led us to much less elaborate quarters to lick our wounds.

After they closed our door, we heard them break into an argument. No one in our group understood their language, so I pulled out my reading glass and held it to my ear. As I suspected, that did not help; that I can read any language with it does not give me the ability to hear. So then I pulled out a potion of tongues.

I'd never used the tongues spell before. It was fascinating; I was able to understand them and knew that I could also speak languages I do not know, so I relayed the argument to the rest of the group in halfling and in Turok's native tongue. (I did not want them overhearing me doing so in the common tongue, which they obviously speak.)

Hamid was quite upset; it sounded like he was doing a combination of growling, spitting, and crackling as he argued that we are not worthy and that if we can't even defeat them, we have no hope of defeating Garrett. Zaid was hissing as he argued strongly that they have to help us, because their fires are cooling and there are no other candidates. That's interesting -- they've been here for at least 500 years but are not immortal. I guess the sickness affects them too. Farooq said that it does them no harm to let us try again, but the argument was almost entirely between Hamid and Zaid, neither of whom was persuading the other.

This went on for quite some time with no progress. I think by the time it was over the others in our group were starting to recognize certain words.

So it seems that we will be allowed to fight again for the chance to visit the oracle. This means we need to not repeat the mistakes we made today.

We learned some lessons from the fight, which we have been discussing. We did not spread out enough quickly enough, and they were able to team up on us. The first thing Indzihar did was hit us with an area dispel magic. Meanwhile, they stayed in a tight grouping and used their long reach with weapons to double- and triple-team us. In addition, they are very good at grappling, which prevented Turok from being effective. We cannot reinforce each other so well, so we need to spread out and lure them into spreading out.

I spent much of my time trying to counter spells cast by Indzihar, which meant I wasn't doing much offensively. This will probably be true when we face Garrett and Melisande, too. Liandra'a quench spell was very effective in this fight, but she had trouble getting languars to take effect. My cold-balls were not very effective because they all had cold resistance.

I learned that invisibility can be a handicap and not just an advantage; I had given Kyle invisibility but they were still able to hit him and knock him down, and that meant I had to spend valuable time dismissing the spell instead of acting against them. That was long enough for Indzihar to cast a very-effective dispel on me. At that point Turok and Kyle had yielded and Liandra was trying to heal Kyle, and three of the salamanders were within weapons-reach of me, so we had no choice but to yield the fight.

Zaid summoned a huge smoke elemental into the fight. I guess it makes sense that they could do that. It wasn't a spell, though, so I was not able to interfere with it.

We should have been using more targetted offensive enchantments and similar effects; that might have forced Indzihar to spend some of her dispel spells on removing them instead of attacking us.

As we were discussing this, Liandra had the idea to invite Zaid in for a conversation, since he seems inclined to help us. This is an excellent idea, and I hear him coming down the hall now. More later.

May 2, later

Zaid was very helpful and very comforting. He urged us not to give up hope; luck was not on our side, and our tactics need work (as we'd already concluded). He got us to think more about our advantages and their disadvantages; in particular, we are faster and more mobile, and we have a broader range of spells. They, however, are strong and have the advantages of reach and size. So he urged us to not rush in an engage, and to stay back and fight them with spells. If we can fly above them and interfere with their attempts to cast spells, we could win the fight with greater ease.

We also need to coordinate our attacks better. While we had intended to damage Indzihar early, we did not succeed in doing that. Had we forced her to yield, the rest of the fight would have gone much differently. We will need to think of ways to take her out early.

He gave us some specific advice on fighting Farooq and Hamid, as well as himself, and wished us well in our fight. It's clear that he really does want us to prevail and thinks we can do so. I certainly hope we can.

And now, armed with this advice and our own observations, we need to form a battle plan. I wish Hrolf were here; he always manages to cheer me up at times like this. I had expected to be back with him by now. I miss him. I considered using the crystal ball to talk with him, but I don't want our hosts to misinterpret outside contact as cheating in our duel.