This was one hell of a raid! Just getting to the main fight was a test for his guild. One they had already failed at twice!

Brannigan had called a recent break to let the healers administer first aid and mend some wounds. Then some additional time was needed to let the clerics get some of their mana back. Even with a snack of mana imbued bacon, potions, and a bard singing it took some time. The path to the raid area was wearing them down, bit by bit. The first part was all survival and dealing with trash mobs on the way to the big fight at the end. The area was infested with stone-lurkers, psycho-shrooms, huge carnivorous moles, giant vampire bats, and poisonous centipedes of unusual size. The local denizens were introducing themselves to the raid one by one.

First had been the discovery that the glowing purple mushrooms that shed a little light in the caves shouldn't be picked. TerryToony had thought that they would make great torches. The paladin had picked two of them, held them up high, and walked around the raid shouting, "May the Holy Light of the Purple Mushroom bless you all." The colorful fungus did shed good light when he held them up, but they also started shedding glowing purple spores that floated down and outlined Terry and anyone nearby in soft purple light. One of the clerics had laughed at him and joined in. "I too will become a devotee to the Holy Purple Mushroom!" After that, everyone had to pick them. The air was swirling with spores, and everyone in the raid was glowing in the dark. Any predator nearby was attracted to the easy to spot prey.

Then things got worse.

Some idiot joked about them being snowflakes and held out her tongue to catch them. It had been Tequila-Jane of course. Her character was a Sword Witch wielding a Chaos blade. Her choices for a class and weapon reflected her personality. Jane was not the most stable of people to start with. Fun to have around though. After a mouthful of psycho-shroom she started really glowing and proclaimed she was not only blessed by the Fungus God, but had gained 10 core skill points for eating the purple fungus. She ran around laughing and singing, proclaiming herself to be the incarnation of Coyote-Bob, God of chaos.

Half the raid immediately tried to catch the flakes on their tongues, or eat the mushrooms. They'd assume Jane's antics were just part of being Jane. But the mushrooms turned out to be highly psycho active, Half the raid went crazy, running off into the dark, where the waiting predators found them to be both tasty and easy to find. Other players began fighting with each other while claiming that goblins were attacking. Four of the wizards stood in the middle of the chaos arguing with each other over which anime character was the most powerful and whether the Hulk could beat Superman.

Twenty-three people died, and they decided to put off the raid until the next day. The core skill points were totally a figment of Jane's imagination. Coyote-Bob never showed up. Psycho-shrooms were avoided after that, partly because of the horrifying hangover they gave the next day. Brannigan saw that Tequila-Jane had a small pouch on her belt with a slight purple glow. She was sneaking pinches of mushroom every now and then, and chewing them down. But at least she was behaving mostly normal, so he let it slide. "Mostly Normal" was pretty mild for Tequila-Jane.

The next day, the did better. With a lot of the trash mobs killed the day before, the raid made it to the same spot where the glowing fungus fiasco had occurred, now devoid of mushrooms. They were just in time to be attacked by two huge mole creatures. Normally the moles avoided the area because of the psycho-shrooms, but with the glowing fungus missing, they were expanding their hunting territory. One dug out of the wall from each side, springing an ambush.

That fight hadn't gone too badly. This group at least knew how to kill things. Fighters ran to engage each of the moles, and the clerics backed them up with heals. There was a bit of confusion, but the moles were both killed after a few minutes. The creatures had a huge amount of health and turned out to be low level bosses.

Congratulations! Your raid has fought and killed two named bosses: Olaf and Iggy Molinsky

For slaying the Molinsky brothers, each member of the raid has earned 200 experience and 2 Core Skill points.

Your reputation with the Moletariat would go down if you weren't already at the bottom. Those moles hate everybody.

Moral went up after that. CSP were always nice to get. Players could kill trash mobs to level, and some had done so continuously until they hit the soft cap at the top of Level 5. Then they did the least amount of work to move on to level 6 and the second tier. This resulted in no option to upgrade their classes. Some were working on repeating this losing strategy, while others had learned their lesson and started over. It wasn't enough to do just the basics. The most successful guilds had players that pushed past a stat of 5 by raising their caps. They earned CSP by killing bosses and raiding constantly. Brannigan could only hope this raid would put his little group on that path.

It was the special skills you could buy with CSP that let a player customize their character and become more powerful. That was one of the reasons he had agreed to do this raid. The bigger the fight and the crazier the monsters, the bigger the reward. And doing crazy things and big quests gave a lot better options for upgrades in Tier 2. Brannigan had started out as a vanilla fighter. After reaching Tie2 he'd been offered the classes: Fighter, Trashhauler, and Goblinslayer. He'd decided to start over.

The raid was dealing fairly well with random lurker attacks and trash mobs until they got to the bridge. It was just a basic stone bridge across a 30-foot-wide chasm. It was ten foot wide, level, with no traps, and should have been no problem to walk across.

They had checked it out as best they could first, just to be sure. A thief had slowly snuck across using stealth and checking for traps. A wizard had declared it to be completely non-magical.

The bridge wasn't trapped, but it was certainly dangerous. As people with torches or light globes started walking across the bridge, giant bats had swooped down, knocking two people to their deaths. The raid had prepared for a fight, as another dozen bats were seen flying down, but the bats were content to fly down into the chasm and feast on the tenderized corpses. The raid moved onward. The players would lose their gear. Brannigan wasn't going to risk sending down a group to resurrect the two, and possibly lose more people.

The latest obstacle had been a steep incline that ended in a thirty-foot drop. Mickey had scouted ahead and said it wasn't a bad climb down to the drop-off, and they could rig a rope to help people descend. Mickey and Fleegle were working on putting pitons into the rock to secure the ropes, and a ranger named Leafrot was scouting further ahead.

Climbing slowly down a steep slope was tricky, but not difficult if you went slowly, and faced back uphill. Climbing down a thirty-foot rope shouldn't be tough for most players. If someone had no skills at all to help, and bad physical stats, a fighter could lower them with a harness So it shouldn't have been a problem getting everyone down. But of course, since it looked easy and was taking some time to do, some of the players got bored and improvised.

The first five people had slowly made their way down successfully and two started down the ropes. Five more were on the way, but two of those decided to walk down normally, instead of backwards. Jester wanted to show off his monks’ skills and slide down like he was snowboarding, which made TheBlueBishop decide to try the same stunt, despite having no agility skills.

The rest of the raid saw people moving quicker and pushed ahead. Rocks and pebbles starting rolling downhill, disturbed by the passage of so many people. A wizard patiently waiting his turn for a rope got hit in the head with a rock and tumbled from the cliff, taking a bard halfway down the rope with her. Both landed in a pile at the bottom with half their health, until more rocks and more people started falling on them.

Jester made it down fine, jumped off the edge like it was a ski ramp, and landed in a roll far down slope, unharmed. Not so his imitator, TheBluebishop. Clerical robes flying around him, the portly man tripped, rolled, knocked into two more players and all three fell off the cliff, one dying as the portly cleric landed on him.

Of the thirty-six players to start, 27 made it down the cliff, 16 with broken bones of some type. Three more died when Jester came racing back to camp, pursued by a giant praying mantis he had disturbed. Leafrot never returned from his scouting mission

Brannigan called it at that point. They needed to heal, dead players knocked off the bridge needed to catch up with the raid, and everyone was low on mana and health. They made fires, put out bedrolls, and ate meals, followed by designating the camp as their resurrection point. Brannigan organized the players in shifts so that the camp was never abandoned and the rest could log out. They'd get the group healed and all together for the next leg of the journey.

Overall, he wasn't upset with the event. It had some traps and things they had learned to avoid, but they were all getting better at paying attention and looking for threats. The trash mobs weren't really trash and they were getting some good experience. Coyote-Jane claimed to have gained a level for real and a heritage option. But she also still clung to being an avatar of Coyote-Bob, so who knew? What he really liked was how the event made him feel like they were really exploring into the unknown. He knew the fights were probably level-appropriate and scaled to the area, but it still felt like they might run into something really nasty at any moment. This had made the players pay attention and stay serious and mostly silent.

It was a good player experience, and he wondered what else they'd run into before they did the invasion of the rat-kin area.