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Wrapping up the cliffhanger from the previous session ...
It was a dark and dreary night as we trudged back into the courtyard of the ruined castle, laden with our gear and burdens of the day. Reuben and myself, Malasion Attukha, we both still under the ill effects of the earlier black mold spore exposure. Master Dwarf and Winterlion were bringing up the rear of the line with the last of the gear.
Suddenly the night was pierced by a eardrum-splitting shriek as a fell winged beast swooped down at us!
This is why Wizards wear brown pants. Demilo took the brunt of the first attack but dove or rolled out of the way and then struck off to safety in the central keep. Lucky him. The rest of us were left in the Courtyard by Marriot dealing with the foul valet. Reuben and quickly Master Dwarf found themselves alone in the middle of the courtyard. I think it it may have been Matt the Knife who came up with this bit of genius: hide along the walls. I would have much prefered this alternative bit of genius: hide in the tower with Demilo. But alas, I was still pondering the fleetness of my own mortality. Reuben managed a quick blast of projected light that temporarily blinded or stunned the beast and gave us a moment to seek shelter.
Quickly we were all, myself included, along the inside of the wall waiting for another swooping attack. The next attack caught us all off guard again and nearly skewered me outright. I barely had time to summon some elemental fire and incinerate the beast before it was on me again, head ablaze and thickened hide blistering. I'm told that thanks for driving off the beast go largely to our Master Dwarf, while thanks for my resuscitation go to Reuben.
Afterward resting and recovering we took some time to explore the vacant and uninteresting upper levels of the keep. At the top we found the beast's lair and droppings. Elise set a masterful snare trap for the beast and we monitored the trap for two days before giving up on it. I took the liberty of this time to personally and mystically examine the crown we had recovered, satisfying myself that it is either mundane and nonmagical, or if magical then latent and not usable except by someone so much more powerful than myself that adding a "crown" to his/her arsenal doesn't increase the threat to us. We marched back to the beach so that we would be sure to catch our scheduled ride.
At the dawn of the day we'd arranged for pick up, we were surprised to see rowing out of the mist a longship bearing the Margrave's flag instead of a couple of dingys with fisherman crews. Reuben took off to hide in the bushes, but much to our weary eyes who should appear but Don Jose himself, the Sicilian Mafioso who hired us for this job in the first place. Odd of him to come all the way out here for us, but it turns out that this whole "crown" escapade was merely some pre-planned test preparatory to a more permenant hire offer.
We're now commissioned as "Wardens of the March", or in honor of our last escapade I prefer "Wardens of the Marsh".
Our first mission:
The Margrave sends annually an armed longship out all the way to the coast to check that the way is still clear and to see if the mists at the coast have receeded. That ship was sent out about a month ago on what should have been a one week (maybe 10 days tops) roundtrip and has not returned. The captain had the leeway that if the mists had receeded he could explore a little further, perhaps to see where the mists had receeded to, but still should have returned long ago.
Seek. Find. Rescue. Return. Report.
Did I mention that as Wardens we get no salary or stipend? No income? I didn't mention that? Well it is true. We can, on the other hand, draw upon the Margrave and his nobles for supplies as needed. For this trip we didn't ask for much more than food and a 8-man longboat. I don't think we're taking sufficient advantage of this situation. Next time I'm going to get some new clothes tailored for me and see if we can get some better kit for some folks. A high steel rapier would be nice if I ever got myself in a situation where I needed to defend myself physically on the basis of my own skill and defensive magics.
It was about a day by longship from the Margrave's island to the outlet river, and from there it should be maybe 3-4 days to the coast. Perhaps longer since we'll be more drifting with current than rowing steadily.
After a couple days we found a nice hilltop keep on the south side of the river. We left it unexplored. A couple hours later we found the wreck of the ship we were looking for. We rowed back upriver, crossed to the north bank, disembarked, and walked up on the wreck to examine it.
Zombies. The crew had been zombified.
So after the zombies (score 2 for Reuben's magic and 2 for my magic, 2 ran away, and 3 were bludgeoned to death) we crossed back to the south and rested the night before exploring further. Took about half a day, but we found where the rest of the crew had been taken. We knew of 30 crew on the longship. We fought 9 as zombies. The other 21, including the captain? All executed, throats slit, lined up execution style, and bled out with nary a drop spilling to the ground. Reuben's magic divined this to be the work of three individuals working as a team. My magic determined that the nearby crop circle was indeed a magic circle powered for ritual purposes. We're picking up a trail that is almost a month old at this point, so clues were sparse and magic dispersed over time. Further examination may be possible, and the Weathertop on the other side of the river may yield more clues.
Showing posts with label fellbeast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fellbeast. Show all posts
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Vol 2 Issue 2: 29 Nov 2008
Yeah, what DID we get ourselves into? Well at the start it seemed like it was a good idea at the time.
Who am I kidding? Everyone had misgivings about the job from the start but we let Reuben get us all hired. It seemed kinda easy.
Back it up a bit.
Matt the Knife, short little troubleseeker that he is, sniffed out some local that told him that he needs to visit the "southern marshes" to find some special plant. Supposed to be some cash in recovering this plant. So he spent most of his waking hours down by the docks interviewing sailors and trolling for seamen.
Then Reuben decided that he wanted to hang up a shingle in town. Not like AD&D days where you had to hit "name level" to be able to open your own church. But I don't think that I'd be so generous as to call Reuben's first attempt a "church". More like he rented an arctic entryway from someone who didn't need the side entrance to their shop, giving him a space about the size of your average confessional booth to work his priestcraft. Price was cheap. Since we'd already dropped coin on a month's lodging at the inn we did the same (5 weeks) for Reuben's venture as an "investment". Maybe it'll pay off some day.
Maybe we should have drawn up a contract.
An investment much more likely to pay off: a new better bow for Demilo.
Everything was going smooth until Reuben got a "social call" from the "representative" of the local variant of the Sicilian Mafia. The Don had an offer for us, an offer we couldn't refuse. An offer to take a large cash settlement in exchange for services not yet rendered. Services that would be rendered by sailing to the "southern marsh", seeking out an ancient castle, poking around past some unspoken danger, and recovering a crown.
Well, we didn't get all of that up front. We didn't get most of the information until we said we'd take the job. Then by the time we found out that we're out to recover the Crown of Mastery it was too late to say no. Not without incuring the Wrath of Don.
We figured at this point that we knew just enough about the job to be worth killing, but not enough to be worth sending someone who would do a good job of killing us. Thus earning ourselves a bounty of being hunted "to the pain". We couldn't even reasonably return the cash advance without incuring the Wrath of Don.
So we took the job.
I had a scheme to find some local mercantile house or trader with access to a ship and get in with them. Eventually, of course, I'd like to establish trade between the north and this benighted little deep south suburb. But it turns out that the government style down here is totally fascist and dictatorial. We figured out, through some combination of sociology and scatology, that the local population must have been whittled down to next to maybe a handful of families with only the strongest (not necessarily the largest) and most tightly organized group surviving. So they probably have the genetic diversity of the cheetah, having incurred a sharp bottleneck some 50 generations ago and slowly built up population from there.
Oh, my scheme didn't work.
Reuben did his best impersonation of an ignorant foreigner who wanted to go hunting. He does a good impersonation of a big ignorant foreigner. It bought us a boat ride to the bayou of the deep south. A little Creedence was playing in the background. Or was that banjo music?
At this point were were well stocked up with stuff that I/we (mostly me) thought that we'd need to brave the wilderness again. I bought new clothes, two sets and boots, for everyone. Plus: hard tack rations for a couple weeks each, hammocks to serve double as ponchos and tarps, new packs as needed, a set of 10' poles, rope, climbing gear, a grappling hook, pitons, iron spikes, and a looong list of sundry items. We had our bargeboys drop us off in the deep south, wave goodbye, and we started trekking inland.
The majority of the gear was strung up on a travois and lugged around like a body on a litter. I can only guess that Winterloin must have been helping Reuben do the heavy lifting while Demilo probed ahead on the path as we made our way through the swamp. I'm certain that everyone was wet, cold, buggy, muddy, and had blisters from brand new boots by the time we found a spot of high-and-dry to camp for the night. The next day we set off again and found a decrepit ruined rundown broken castle. Did I mention that it was old? It was so old that the moat had filled with sediment. It was so old that it looked like a big green ivy infestation.
Did I mention that we'd heard some big screaming thing in the night? Yeah, we forgot about it too.
Fast forward, to the "castle". I use the term loosely. Upstairs or downstairs? Downstairs. Hall or down again? Hall. Door? Open it, choke us all on some toxic mold, and thus started a venture into Dave's Tomb of Horrors (Lite). After the toxic mold deathtrap, we discovered the "darkness spell" trigger on a door leading to a 20' spiked pittrap. Swag. Fortunately nobody fell in. All the way. Then there was the room of poisoned dart traps leading to a fake door and a dead end. There was the stairs leading down that turned into a slick ramp leading to another 20' spiked pittrap. No swag. No casualties. Did I miss something along the way? Eventually we came to a room with writing carefully engraved into the wall and then furiously chiselled out. A big puzzle. We worked the puzzle for a while, and then eventually checked gamespot for some clues before solving it. We had the wordsmith part of the puzzle almost solved and I was just about to drag out my laptop and whip up a grep dictionary attack to solve the puzzle when Joe coughed up a solution that fit. We ran with it, and everything else pretty much fell into place after that. With no further casualty or danger, we recovered the Crown of Mastery.
Okay, whats a Crown of Mastery?
I'd love to tell you. Reuben stuffed it in a bag and crammed it in his backpack before I could try to attune it and figure it out.
But if I had to guess, the Crown has something to do with us getting out if this place alive. Thats what would happen in a Robert Jordan novel. We'd have to use the crown to get past the dragon to escape. But if this was in a Lovecraft novel, we'd use the crown and summon a Deep One and we'd all go crazy and die. But then it wouldn't matter what we'd do, because in a Lovecraft novel everyone goes crazy and a Deep One gets summoned and everyone dies. So if we have a hope of survival, it is that Dave reads more Jordan than Lovecraft.
Did I mention a dragon?
Big, flying, screaming, not breathing fire on us. Yet. Nobody has taken the time to count limbs. Maybe its a big wyvern. Or a cockatrice. Or a manticore. Or Reuben's daemon that I "dispelled" when I cancelled that magical darkness.
Yeah, thats why its important for everyone to be there on the 20th.
Who am I kidding? Everyone had misgivings about the job from the start but we let Reuben get us all hired. It seemed kinda easy.
Back it up a bit.
Matt the Knife, short little troubleseeker that he is, sniffed out some local that told him that he needs to visit the "southern marshes" to find some special plant. Supposed to be some cash in recovering this plant. So he spent most of his waking hours down by the docks interviewing sailors and trolling for seamen.
Then Reuben decided that he wanted to hang up a shingle in town. Not like AD&D days where you had to hit "name level" to be able to open your own church. But I don't think that I'd be so generous as to call Reuben's first attempt a "church". More like he rented an arctic entryway from someone who didn't need the side entrance to their shop, giving him a space about the size of your average confessional booth to work his priestcraft. Price was cheap. Since we'd already dropped coin on a month's lodging at the inn we did the same (5 weeks) for Reuben's venture as an "investment". Maybe it'll pay off some day.
Maybe we should have drawn up a contract.
An investment much more likely to pay off: a new better bow for Demilo.
Everything was going smooth until Reuben got a "social call" from the "representative" of the local variant of the Sicilian Mafia. The Don had an offer for us, an offer we couldn't refuse. An offer to take a large cash settlement in exchange for services not yet rendered. Services that would be rendered by sailing to the "southern marsh", seeking out an ancient castle, poking around past some unspoken danger, and recovering a crown.
Well, we didn't get all of that up front. We didn't get most of the information until we said we'd take the job. Then by the time we found out that we're out to recover the Crown of Mastery it was too late to say no. Not without incuring the Wrath of Don.
We figured at this point that we knew just enough about the job to be worth killing, but not enough to be worth sending someone who would do a good job of killing us. Thus earning ourselves a bounty of being hunted "to the pain". We couldn't even reasonably return the cash advance without incuring the Wrath of Don.
So we took the job.
I had a scheme to find some local mercantile house or trader with access to a ship and get in with them. Eventually, of course, I'd like to establish trade between the north and this benighted little deep south suburb. But it turns out that the government style down here is totally fascist and dictatorial. We figured out, through some combination of sociology and scatology, that the local population must have been whittled down to next to maybe a handful of families with only the strongest (not necessarily the largest) and most tightly organized group surviving. So they probably have the genetic diversity of the cheetah, having incurred a sharp bottleneck some 50 generations ago and slowly built up population from there.
Oh, my scheme didn't work.
Reuben did his best impersonation of an ignorant foreigner who wanted to go hunting. He does a good impersonation of a big ignorant foreigner. It bought us a boat ride to the bayou of the deep south. A little Creedence was playing in the background. Or was that banjo music?
At this point were were well stocked up with stuff that I/we (mostly me) thought that we'd need to brave the wilderness again. I bought new clothes, two sets and boots, for everyone. Plus: hard tack rations for a couple weeks each, hammocks to serve double as ponchos and tarps, new packs as needed, a set of 10' poles, rope, climbing gear, a grappling hook, pitons, iron spikes, and a looong list of sundry items. We had our bargeboys drop us off in the deep south, wave goodbye, and we started trekking inland.
The majority of the gear was strung up on a travois and lugged around like a body on a litter. I can only guess that Winterloin must have been helping Reuben do the heavy lifting while Demilo probed ahead on the path as we made our way through the swamp. I'm certain that everyone was wet, cold, buggy, muddy, and had blisters from brand new boots by the time we found a spot of high-and-dry to camp for the night. The next day we set off again and found a decrepit ruined rundown broken castle. Did I mention that it was old? It was so old that the moat had filled with sediment. It was so old that it looked like a big green ivy infestation.
Did I mention that we'd heard some big screaming thing in the night? Yeah, we forgot about it too.
Fast forward, to the "castle". I use the term loosely. Upstairs or downstairs? Downstairs. Hall or down again? Hall. Door? Open it, choke us all on some toxic mold, and thus started a venture into Dave's Tomb of Horrors (Lite). After the toxic mold deathtrap, we discovered the "darkness spell" trigger on a door leading to a 20' spiked pittrap. Swag. Fortunately nobody fell in. All the way. Then there was the room of poisoned dart traps leading to a fake door and a dead end. There was the stairs leading down that turned into a slick ramp leading to another 20' spiked pittrap. No swag. No casualties. Did I miss something along the way? Eventually we came to a room with writing carefully engraved into the wall and then furiously chiselled out. A big puzzle. We worked the puzzle for a while, and then eventually checked gamespot for some clues before solving it. We had the wordsmith part of the puzzle almost solved and I was just about to drag out my laptop and whip up a grep dictionary attack to solve the puzzle when Joe coughed up a solution that fit. We ran with it, and everything else pretty much fell into place after that. With no further casualty or danger, we recovered the Crown of Mastery.
Okay, whats a Crown of Mastery?
I'd love to tell you. Reuben stuffed it in a bag and crammed it in his backpack before I could try to attune it and figure it out.
But if I had to guess, the Crown has something to do with us getting out if this place alive. Thats what would happen in a Robert Jordan novel. We'd have to use the crown to get past the dragon to escape. But if this was in a Lovecraft novel, we'd use the crown and summon a Deep One and we'd all go crazy and die. But then it wouldn't matter what we'd do, because in a Lovecraft novel everyone goes crazy and a Deep One gets summoned and everyone dies. So if we have a hope of survival, it is that Dave reads more Jordan than Lovecraft.
Did I mention a dragon?
Big, flying, screaming, not breathing fire on us. Yet. Nobody has taken the time to count limbs. Maybe its a big wyvern. Or a cockatrice. Or a manticore. Or Reuben's daemon that I "dispelled" when I cancelled that magical darkness.
Yeah, thats why its important for everyone to be there on the 20th.
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