RangerWickett
Legend
An Introduction to Tides of Homeland
When we first started in Spring of 1999, none of my players had much experience with AD&D, so the prologue was run with minimal prep time, using a pre-published adventure adapted from the game world of Talislanta. It sets the stage for the rest of the storyhour, and I trust you'll be pleased to learn that this will probably be the longest of any of the posts you'll see.
We gamed from Spring of '99 until summer of 2000, when Jessie decided she wanted to run Savannah Knights. Sorry, I just wanted to tell you how impressed I am with Jessie's DMing skill since she'd only been a player for just over 1 year.
Now I'm done setting up the story. I hope you enjoy the prologue, and don't worry. Most of the posts won't be this long. Oh, and if you read the Savannah Knights storyhour (which I played in), then hopefully you'll like this one also.
See the High Fantasy website for more information.
Prologue: The Mystery at the Magical Fair
Dramatis Personae:
Hera “Harley” Fyana—1st level Vaneljesti Elvish thief (2nd edition) or 1st level Vaneljesti Elvish bard (3rd edition), played by Jessica Jones
James T. Rocket—1st level half-Innenlesti Elvish fighter, played by Nic Bumpus
Cast of Thousands—played by the DM, RangerWickett
The Magical Fair of Lyceum is one of the few times when magic-users are able to freely share and display their talents to the world. The Arcane Academy, located in the Nozama Empire capital city of Lyceum, hosts the Magical Fair every seven years to attract all sorts of magicians, sorcerers, spiritualists, shamans, and charlatans for the purpose of delighting in the powers of magic. Lyceum grudgingly allows the festival because of the trade it brings in, though the average citizen must for decency’s sake hide his or her interest in attending the fair.
Vendors hawk their wares, talismancers charm and protect the superstitious, wizards sell their knowledge, and magi of all sorts dazzle audiences with performances ranging from the acrobatic to the militant. Amid the throngs of thousands who exhibit or attend the festival, tensions are often high, so the Arcane Academy makes sure to hire fair guards that can blend showmanship with their duty to protect the peace. Many are attracted by the promise of easy payment for simply breaking up the occasional fight, since the Academy mages handle all sorcerous disruptions, but some fair guards participate because of curiosity. Unlike the typical atmosphere of the Nozama Empire, Lyceum’s Magical Fair openly welcomes non-humans, mostly just because many fair-goers can’t tell the difference between the genuine and the illusory.
The Fairkeepers know that the crowds like spectacles, so hiring privileges go first to those with dazzling looks, and next to those with dazzling skills. Somewhere further down the line comes the need for cheap muscle. In the interest of balance, the Fairkeepers usually assign pairs together that can complement each other. Such is the case with one of the most distinctive pairs of fair guards.
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The fifth night of the week-long fair, a theft occurred in a merchant’s stall. The chief fairguard assigns two of his most productive and popular guards so far to handle the investigation.
James T. Rocket stands out in the crowd in nearly every imaginable way, so most of the festival-goers assume he’s somehow magically costumed. Nearly six-and-a-half feet tall, James dresses in well-worn yet still gleaming chainmail, covered with simple yet fashionable clothes. He wears a longsword and a shield, and has already garnered a reputation at the fair by cutting off the leg of a thief who tried to steal wares from a magic shop. The cost to pay for the girl’s healing was taken from James’ wages. James has pure white hair and purple irises, and the slant of his eyes and slightly pointed ears indicate him as a half-Elf. He looks almost perpetually bored, except for when talking to his fellow guard and new friend, Harley.
Harley stands out just as easily, though in vivid contrast with James. Barely over five feet tall, Harley’s unearthly grace and slender form mark her unmistakeably as an Elf. She normally attempts to hide her pointed ears under her red-brown hair, but at the festival she basks in the surprised gazes of the fair-goers. Her skill at prestidigitation, which she’ll gladly display to anyone who seems interested, has convinced most of the normal citizens of Lyceum that Harley must be a disguised sorceress. That doesn’t stop men from staring at her immodestly and women from staring at her jealously.
Their superior assigns James and Harley to check out the scene of the crime, a pavilion stall called “The Burning Sky” (a reference to an ancient magical torch), owned by a man named Arjan Thembool. The shop specializes in light-generating and sun-motif merchandise, magical or mundane in nature, and Harley and James arrive, appropriately, right at sunrise.
Arjan Thembool is from Kequalak, a northern nation generally disliked in Nozama, but neither James nor Harley are locals, so they listen to the man without prejudice. Arjan explains that he arrived about an hour before sunrise to get ready for the fair’s opening when he discovered that his stall had been vandalized during the night. He’s angry, but not hysterical, but he seems to grow frustrated by James’ lack of emotion. James cooly asks for the merchant to tell them everything that’s out of order.
Arjan takes them inside his pavilion as the first of the day’s fairgoers begin to filter into the festival. A moat surrounds the entire festival field, with only one bridge allowing entrance. Arjan’s pavilion is exactly opposite of the bridge, located on the far side of the fair, right next to the moat, so it will be a few minutes before any customers arrive.
The merchant holds the flap of the tent open for Harley to enter first, and she stops in surprise at the brightness of the interior. Hundreds of small curios shed soft white glows, contributing to filling nearly the entire tent with light. Only one far corner is dimmed in shadow. As Harley, James, and Arjan walk into the tent, Harley comments that he was just asking to be robbed, since his must have been the only shop that was lit up last night. He made it easy for the thieves. Arjan frowns at this, and gets back to business, pointing out what was damaged or stolen. A faint murmuring fills the room, and Harley glances around for its source while Arjan explains the theft.
Almost all the damage took place in the darker corner of the room, where most of the light-shedding objects are broken or missing. The first was a tiny clockwork Dragon that breathed illusory flames every hour; its head and neck were ripped apart, and the rest of its gears lay strewn across the floor. A rack of Tundanesti Elvish scimitars, all enchanted to glow dimly, was knocked onto the floor. Arjan had a vase filled with glowing fluid set atop the rack, so it is shattered also, and a hideously smelling gunk has tarnished the scimitar blades and ruined an elaborate carpet on the floor. Additionally, the rug has been slashed repeatedly, all the strokes going the same direction. Numerous other small objects fell onto the floor when the rack was knocked over, but nothing of value.
The only object that appears to have been stolen was an amberglass sphere, roughly a foot across, filled with an alchemical gas called Yellow Peril. The poisonous gas is primarily used to kill vermin, but because it has a side effect of faint luminesence, Arjan owned a sphere of it for his shop. He knows of how dangerous the gas is (if the sphere broke it would easily kill anything within 20 feet), but the amberglass sphere it contained within is sturdy enough to resist shattering while dropped. As an added precaution, he even had anti-theft enchantments placed upon it for the duration of the fair, so he would know if it left the fairgrounds. Whoever the thieves are, they haven’t gone far.
While Harley and James discuss who they need to talk to as far as figuring out who’d want to steal the sphere and why, and whether it would’ve been possible to remove the anti-theft enchantment, the murmuring in the room grows louder. Arjan raises his voice slightly and suggests that they should leave, since obviously one of his magical wares is going awry, but James waves him off. The two guards scour the shop for the source of the noise, and they finally pinpoint it as coming from overhead, from an unlit lantern. James climbs onto an unsturdy table and reaches for the lantern.
He opens it, and sees inside a small, shrunken head. A shrunken Goblin head, its eyes shut and skin taut. As soon as he sees the lantern, however, the murmuring stops, and James looks down to Harley and shrugs. He begins to unlatch the lantern from the top of the tent, when suddenly the shrunken head’s eyes snap open and it shouts with a grin, “Boo!”
James doesn’t startle, and though the head begins to giggle at its joke, it looks at James and pouts with a high-pitched voice, “I was scared.”
James glares at the little decapitated talking head in boredom, then glances down to Harley. He notices that Arjan has just slipped out of the tent, and so he shouts for Harley to follow the man. Harley sprints out the back flap of the tent, leaving James to clamber down in his heavy chainmail.
Harley slips through the tent flaps, stopping only inches away from the edge of the fair’s moat. Glancing in either direction, she sees Arjan running away toward the nearest tent. She shouts for him to stop, then hurls at him Ricochet, her chakram (a thin, aerodynamic ring that spins like a combination axe-boomerang; i.e., the thing that Xena uses). Arjan turns at the last moment and tries to avoid the chakram by leaping out of its way. In so doing, he plunges face first into the moat.
Harley, not quite used to being part of a team, leaps after Arjan without telling James where she went. The moat is only ten feet deep, but is easily 30 feet across, so it takes much hassle to pummel Arjan into submission and drag him back to shore. When Harley reaches the edge of the moat, James reaches down and pulls the merchant up, letting his Elvish co-worker get out herself.
Harley, soaking wet, laments that she just lost her only good weapon—the chakram splashed into the moat. She takes out her frustration on Arjan by trying to interrogate him, but the merchant won’t say why he ran. Finally the head, which James is carrying in his free hand, gibbers out, “I’m illegal!”
James and Harley recall that yes, shrunken head fetishes like these are illegal. They trap the spirit of the deceased in its body, creating a minor form of undead. Of course, the Goblin head seems to be enjoying being just a head. It gabs gaily, eyes closed but with a stupid grin on its lips. In a high pitched voice it sings about how it likes fish, and that it’s really dark.
They interrogate Arjan a little longer and get him to admit that he was smuggling in the head to trade to some necromancers. Harley and James discuss what to do, and realize that the head is the only real witness to the crime. It was, afterall, in the tent all last night, so it must have at least heard what was going on during the robbery. They ask it what happened the night before, and it just moans and says that it has a head ache. They decide to take Arjan in first and ask their superior what to do about the head and the stolen Yellow Peril. James, being the stronger of the two, takes Arjan. Harley, meanwhile, stays behind to make sure no one vandalizes the shop. She keeps the head with her so she can try to ask it questions, and so she can dry off without being stared at by half the festival.
While waiting for James to return from the main guardhouse, Harley pries around inside Arjan’s tent to see what else he might have been smuggling in. She doesn’t find anything particularly incriminating, but decides that Arjan owes her for making her jump into the moat, and for causing her to lose her chakram. Thus, she turns the head so it can’t watch her, then pockets a few gold trinkets to make up the difference.
Still waiting for James, she turns a few customers away and spends her time chatting with the head. It can’t remember its name, or how it ended up decapitated, but it mentions repeatedly that it likes fish, and that it wishes that it had some fish. Maybe she could take him to get some fish? Harley declines, and instead tries to ask it who the thief was.
The Goblin head replies, “I heard legs. . . . Lots of legs. I don’t have any legs. Aww. I kinda wish I had legs. Lots of legs. Tick tick tick and a drip drip drip. Tick drip tick.”
The Goblin also chatters about how wet it is. Harley threatens to throw the head into the moat if it doesn’t answer straight, and it replies that it still has a really bad head-ache, but it really hopes she won’t throw him away. He likes talking to her.
Finally, fed up that James is taking so long, Harley pops the head into a satchel and carries it with her as she tromps back to the main guard tent. There she discovers that James doesn’t remember a thing about the head, or about Arjan attacking them. In fact, about a minute or so after leaving Harley and the head, James just let Arjan go. Harley unsuccessfully tries to jog James’ memory, but he suddenly remembers everything as soon as the head begins jabbering again. Feeling somewhat nervous, they put the head back in the bag and talk to their superior.
Their superior is nervous and suggests that the vandalism must have been to cover the theft of the Yellow Peril. They tell him about the head and ask if he wants it, but the head begins blathering that it doesn’t want to go, that it’s not safe, and that it thinks that the darkness inside Harley’s back is so nice and cozy and dark and quiet and ticking and dripping and dark and fishy.
Needless to say, their superior tells them to keep the head.
At his orders, they head out to an alchemist’s shop not too far away. One of the few permanent structures in the fair, it’s a three-story tower where mages from the Arcane Academy display and sell alchemical and magical potions, balms, and oils. Their new mission is to find out about the Yellow Peril and see if anyone in particular would have reason to steal some. They wisely decide to keep the head under wraps, but as they try to enter the alchemist’s pavilion, they get stopped by actual sorcerous security.
(The Magical Fair is both a festival for entertainment, and the convention in which the new president of the Lyceum wizard’s guild is chosen. Throughout the festival, high-ranking members give speeches, engage in spellcraft duels, and generally vie for supremacy. On the sixth day, today, a debate is held with the key contenders, and the winner of the debate has a good chance of being elected.)
Since this is the day that most of the high ranking guild members will be at the fair, the wizards are being extra cautious not to let people cause trouble. The gate guard at the pavilion asks for proof of their employment as guards, and after they give it to him, he begins to review it. The Goblin head begins to chatter, muffled from within the bag, and Harley quickly leans over, opens the bag, and says (a bit too loudly), “Shut up, head!”
The alchemist tower guard looks up and asks what Harley just said. In a stammering explanation, Harley explains that . . . um, yeah, this is my friend . . . ‘Head,’ and she gestures to James.
The wizard seems skeptical, so James adds in that Harley’s nickname is ‘Bottom.’ “Old nicknames from our time together at the academy.”
Then from the satchel comes a high-pitched voice, “He’s Head. She’s Bottom.” Harley quickly impersonates the Goblin’s voice to prove that it was her all along, and they bluff their way into the tower. Within, they go to the third floor laboratory to talk to some alchemists and researchers. They talk to several wizards, all of whom say they’ll get the information that Harley and James want, and will be right back. But none of them come back. Curious, they talk to one of the alchemists they’d already seen, but he doesn’t remember seeing them before. Frustrated, James writes the man a note to carry and read repeatedly. The alchemist shrugs and takes the note, heading off to get the information they want.
Since they imagine it’ll be some time before the wizard gets back, they head downstairs and back into the main festival, hoping to get something to eat while they wait. It’s mid-morning, and they’re hungry.
As they walk around the festival, checking at different stalls for food, they notice that a lot of people seem to have head-aches. When Harley asks the Goblin shrunken head fetish if it has a head-ache, it says yes and moans a little bit. It mutters that it’s hungry too, and that it wants fish, so maybe they could look in the moat for fish. James tells it forcefully no, and so the head resentfully shouts “He’s Head! She’s Bottom!” until they cram a cloth into its mouth to gag it.
Oddly, few people seem to notice this spectacle, and none seem to care for more than a moment. Harley and James get some food, then decide to check to see if Arjan might be back at his stall. Harley wagers that he’s forgotten about them entirely.
They do find him at his stall, but he hasn’t forgotten about them. Instead, he remembers them helping him with moving some items he accidentally dropped on the floor. The man doesn’t recall a theft at all, though. Deciding that maybe Arjan not remembering them is a good thing, Harley asks him about where he’s been lately, and whether any of his goods are missing, and who he was planning to sell to. At this point, Arjan does get nervous, but Harley pretends to think he’s just worried about scaring off customers. Using her charm, she manages to get Arjan to say that he had been asked by some Dwarves to bring some goods into the city.
Remembering their initial tour of the festival, they know that there is a small group of evangelical Dwarves in one of the least-visited corners of the festival, but rather than pursuing that lead immediately, they bid Arjan good day and go talk to their superior again. Consistent with the trend, the man doesn’t remember even sending them to investigate a robbery this morning, but for some reason he is curious about whether they found anything interesting. The whole time they talk to him, he emphasizes the word ‘head’ whenever it crops up in a sentence, and he seems to get angry just saying the word. Thankfully the gag is still working, so the Goblin head can’t reveal itself.
Wanting to get away from their superior before he finds out about the head, they quickly ask a few questions about Dwarves. Since Dwarves aren’t typically wizards, most Dwarves who attempt to rent a stall at the Magical Fair have to have all their gear inspected minutely by Academy officials. After they leave the main guardpost, Harley and James discuss that maybe the Dwarves needed something, but knew they couldn’t smuggle it in themselves, and thus hired Arjan to bring it in for them.
Their last task before going to check out the Dwarves is to return to the alchemists’ tower in the vain hope that perhaps someone found information for them. The guard at the door to the tower (the same one as last time) is belligerent to them for no good reason, just saying that he dislikes all these non-magic-using rabble. Harley decides to bribe him so they can get in without trouble, and they end up waiting on the third floor for someone to speak to them. Most of the wizards in the tower have head-aches, and a few just stare blankly at books, not turning a page in over five minutes.
Glancing around cautiously, James and Harley ungag the Goblin and ask it what the hell is going on. Harley tries to be very soothing with it, promising that they’ll find a way to give him a fish if only he’ll help them out.
It whimpers and says, “You can’t wait, can’t wait, since she’s hid away with a mate. It . . . it wetly ponders . . . and coldly wonders. A darkness . . . and a tick tick tick, in a drip drip drip.” The Goblin sobs, its voice filled with pain as it struggles to finish. “Medals and prizes, medals and prizes. Who will mourn for . . . medals and-”
A wizard comes up behind them and cuts off the Goblin shrunken head. He stares at the little head in wonder, saying that he’s amazed that they have one. He’s never seen one before. He asks if he can take a look at the head very briefly. Harley and James cautiously agree, with the conditions that they always stay within view of the head, and that afterward this wizard will get them some info on Yellow Peril.
The wizard joyfully walks them into a laboratory, carrying the head and prying at it with his fingers. He tells them all he knows about Yellow Peril, including a rudimentary explanation of why it glows. While the wizard talks to them, he puts the head on a countertop to better examine it. The shrunken Goblin head has stopped talking and is just whimpering now, and the two guards are too fed up to really care until they both see the alchemist picking up a glass vial filled with fluid. While still happily chatting with his two guests, the wizard up-ends the vial over the fetish, dumping the fluid on it.
The shrunken head screeches in agony and starts to sizzle, and James and Harley leap forward to stop the wizard from melting the head with acid. James tackles the scrawny alchemist, and Harley snatches up the slowly-dissolving head and splashes it with all the water she’s carrying. James quickly tests a large pitcher to make sure it’s water, and then he throws it onto Harley and the head to wash off the acid. Harley ends up burning her hands slightly, but thankfully the acid was a relatively mild one, so neither she nor the head are permanently damaged. Just wet.
James is about to pummel the alchemist into a pulp for trying to ‘kill’ the undead head, when Harley shouts a warning. A stream of flame flashes across the room, searing the far wall and cracking a large glass window with the heat. Harley and James look up to see about a half-dozen wizards striding into the room, all preparing to cast spells. The small crowd blocks the only stairway down.
Harley desperately throws a few vials of funky potions and liquids at the wizards, and then she and James (and the head) make a break for the window. James smashes it apart with his sword, and they both clamber through and leap down. Since the tower is slightly tapered toward the top, they are able to slide to the ground with minimal injury, and once back on their feet they sprint away out of sight of the wizards. James is about to go into a rant about how all the wizards in the city must be out to kill them when the Goblin head starts screaming and whimpering again. Looking around, they see that everyone who can see the head is walking toward them slowly, malevolently.
Harley stuffs the gag back in the Goblin’s mouth to shut it up, and James slams the tiny head back into the satchel. And then they run again, James bum rushing into and knocking down a few scrawny teenagers who were blocking their way.
Once out of sight of the angry mob, they find a shopkeeper who has passed out from a head-ache, and they decide to use his shop (which handily sells healing potions) to hide in. They realize that the evidence points toward the Dwarves being involved, with Arjan as an accomplice, but they can’t figure out what it might be that’s causing everyone to act strangely. The head, when they ungag it, just moans painfully about how much it stinks of fish in the dark, but whenever they try to get it to answer straight, it just whimpers helplessly. Trying to recall all the clues the head had given them, Harley realizes that the head is all that’s keeping them from being controlled by . . . whatever it is.
James agrees, and begins rubbing his head in frustration, starting to feel a headache. Harley is worried, but James tells her it’s not important. “So my head hurts. No big deal. When your bottom starts to hurt, then we should worry.”
They decide to loot a few stores that could prove useful, then confront the Dwarves. They steal a large supply of healing potions, and Harley picks enough pockets (everyone is starting to look comatose) to provide herself with several daggers. They try to be discreet, but since they’re practically the only people in the fair who are even walking anymore, it’s hard to ‘blend in.’ The only movement they see is near the Election Pavilion, where the debates will be held in a few hours. Workers are mindlessly setting up the podium and seats so people can gather and watch. Harley notes that the workers are so numb to their surroundings that the decorations look hideously tasteless.
Walking through the festival, its thoroughfares crowded with sitting or blankly standing people, it takes them nearly half an hour to reach the remote corner of the festival where the Dwarvish ‘church’ is. Even during the days when people weren’t standing around like zombies, the church received very limited attendance, since the Dwarves had tended to heckle most of their visitors into leaving.
Upon seeing the squat stone structure, Harley decides that the best course of action is probably to leave the festival, alert the city guard, and have them handle the problem. To stop her from running, James grabs Harley by the collar and drags her after him.
They stop beside a small tent and peer around the corner to see a trio of Dwarves standing warily around the doorway to their sturdy church. None of them seem to be suffering from head-aches or mind control. James tells Harley to go up and distract the Dwarves, and he’ll sneak around and attack from the side.
Harley walks up boldly, holding a pack of cards in her hands, and tries to impress the Dwarves with a magic trick. She gets about five seconds into the trick before the Dwarves draw forth small axes hidden in their cloaks and attack. Harley is down to 2 hit points before James leaps into the fray. The half-Elven fighter takes out two of the Dwarves, but the third one runs into the building, shouting to sound the alarm. Since James is busy finishing off his second Dwarf, Harley gives chase, rushing into the building.
Inside, in the near-dark, she sees two more Dwarves climbing out of a hole in the floor, and after a moment all three Dwarves begin to advance on her, talking amongst themselves in Dwarvish. Harley shouts for them to drop their weapons, or she’ll have to kill them with her banshee wail.
The Dwarves just laugh and start to rush forward, but Harley plucks the head from her satchel, yanks the gag out of its mouth, and hurls the gibbering, shrieking head at the Dwarves. The Dwarves scream in fright and duck to the ground as the Goblin head sails over them, and before they can get up, Harley manages to stab one in the chest. James enters the room while the Dwarves get their bearings again, and in a few minutes (this was 2nd edition, where a round was a minute long), the battle is over. A quick search of the room uncovers several sheafs of paper covered in Dwarven print, plus a large map of the festival grounds. Since neither of them can read the Dwarvish, James tucks the pages into his vest for later perusal.
Harley and James drink healing potions, then recover (and re-gag) the head and sneak through the trap door in the floor. Underground they hear a steady thrumming that dampens the noise of James trying to move silently in chainmail. A ladder leads down into a dark, roughly-dug cavern. Picks and shovels still lie on the floor near the ladder, so it appears that the cavern was just dug this week during the festival, a fact which is rather amazing, since the cavern is about five feet round, stretching for several hundred feet into the darkness. They move down the tunnel and come to a large room, in the center of which they can barely make out a gathering of at least a dozen Dwarves standing around what appears to be a large chest. The cavern is wide enough, and the odd thrumming is loud enough, that Harley and James manage to swing around the Dwarves to the far side of the tunnel, hoping to explore deeper while avoiding a fight. There are three tunnels that lead into the room—one they just came through, and two others.
James’ head-ache intensifies, and Harley begins to feel a slight pain as well, and the muffled Goblin head begins trying to shout. One of the Dwarves happens to spot them at the edge of the cave, and the whole group of Dwarves begins to scramble. The chest they had been standing around gets picked up and carried away down a side tunnel by a handful of Dwarves, while the rest begin to charge after the intruders. Panicking, Harley runs down the tunnel that the Dwarves did not go down, and James follows.
After a few dozen feet, they come to a dead end. The tunnel ends in a ten-foot across pool of water which rapidly rises, then falls, accompanied by the thrumming that has filled the underground complex. Confused, they’re about to turn and get ready to fight when Harley sees a round metallic object washed up on the shore of the pool. It’s Ricochet, her chakram. She quickly realizes that after it fell into the moat, it must have been sucked into here, and the only way that could have happened is if the pool here connects to the moat somehow. She only has time to shout for James to follow before she leaps into the pool and swims for her life.
They have a hard time clambering through the dirty moat water, a task made even more wretched because bits of fishes float in the murk. When they finally splash to the surface and pull themselves ashore, James and Harley check to make sure the head is still with them. It is, safe in its pack, trying to swallow a fish head.
Muttering about how she’s gotten drenched three times in one day, Harley gets to her feet and then gasps. The entire festival, every single person and a few pets and mounts, are heading in a single direction. Harley asks James again if it’s really a good idea to try to solve this themselves, but James grabs her shirt’s collar as a warning, telling her that it looks like time is running out.
Weaving through the slowly-moving crowd, Harley and James spy the Dwarves in the distance, heading for the main debate pavilion. Before they can get too close, however, the crowd starts to surround them, and James regretfully has to bash a few people’s faces to clear a path. They cut through tents and try to take every feasible shortcut, but by the time they reach the podium, the Dwarves are no where to be seen.
A crowd gathers in the seats set up for the debate, and several elderly wizard-looking people stand on the stage and yell at each other nearly incomprehensibly. Harley and James both feel the sudden urge to sit down and watch the show, and their head-ache intensifies as the Goblin begins to shout in pain, “It’s dark and safe, so loud so loud! Wet and safe. . . . Safe for a mate in a ball of gold, which you break and your body goes cold.”
Hearing that the Goblin head is starting to sound weaker and weaker, they look around for any sign of what the shrunken head might be talking about. The only wet thing they see is the moat. And a small drainage ditch that runs from the moat to the debate pavilion. Normally it would direct rainwater into the moat, but there must definitely be someplace wet under the pavilion.
Patting the Goblin’s head to keep it talking and to try to sooth its pain, Harley heads for one side of the ditch while James comes in from the other. They both rush through the blank-eyed crowds and duck low to crawl into the space beneath the stage. James tears away a curtain shroud, and sunlight streams in brightly.
A hiss comes from the darkness, and as their eyes adjust, James and Harley both see a creature crouching in a corner of the stage’s framework. The monster is at least three feet long, with a half-dozen sharp-tipped legs supported a bloated and chitinous body. Milky white eyes stare at them as the creature cringes, holding a foot-long sphere that glows with a dim yellow light. Several short tentacles writhe beneath the creature’s eyes, carressing the egg-shaped globe of Yellow Peril. The glass of the sphere seems worn and scratched, since the creature had been rubbing and scratching it constantly.
Harley realizes what it’s trying to do, and she takes a step back in worry. Remembering that Arjan had said that another fluid-filled sphere had been shattered the night before, she correctly guesses that it must have been this creature’s egg. She tells James that the thing must think the sphere of Yellow Peril is another egg, one for a mate.
As soon as she finishes warning James, the head begins to moan, then shriek, and the insectile creature rushes forward, hissing and lashing out with one long forelimb, while the other cradles the sphere to its chest. The creature attacks James, tearing through his chainmail with its sharp, scythe-like leg. James and Harley both leap out from under the stage and try to get room enough to fight, and the monster follows them. The creature apparently can’t maintain its telepathic control while fighting, and the entire audience of several hundred begins to clamber around in panic, many people surrounding Harley and James as they try to fight the creature.
Harley feels pain wash over her mind as the monster glares at her, tentacles writhing. James leaps forward and tries to hack at it, but his sword bounces off the tough exoskeleton. The small creature, barely larger than an average dog, slashes out again and cuts across the flesh of James’ belly, nearly cutting him open.
Harley, shaking off the pain, weakly tries to throw daggers at the monster, but they also just bounce off its shell. The crowd forces one fairgoer too close to monster, and the critter rears up and scrapes across the man’s lower body, knocking him to the ground. James again tries to hack at the monster, but his blade skitters off the creature’s back. The fairgoer screams as the monster lashes the flesh from his face with its tentacles, and James tries one more futile time to wound the animal.
Harley, seeing that the monster is too tough to hurt, remembers Arjan telling them that Yellow Peril is used to kill vermin, and she grabs a tent pole from a nearby pavilion, shouting for everyone to run. James looks at Harley in dismay, calls her an idiot, and runs.
The monster, finished killing the helpless citizen, cringes as Harley charges toward it. Harley raises the wooden pole over her head and swings down at the monster, aiming not for its shell, but for the sphere of Yellow Peril. With a heavy smash, the sphere shatters, and a thick, smoky yellow gas spews upward, directly into the creature’s face. The monster shrieks animalistically, and from Harley’s pack comes the Goblin’s voice as it screams in agony too. Harley nearly collapses as pain floods through her, but James grabs her and pulls her away as the thick, deadly fumes spread across the ground.
Everyone runs away in panic, spreading far enough away so the Yellow Peril dissipates into the air. James checks on the head, and finds it inert, its eyes closed and its mouth open in a peaceful, moronic grin. Not too far away, the small monster chokes to death as the toxic gas disintegrates its flesh.
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In the aftermath of the day’s events, James and Harley are called to a meeting with their superior, a few high-ranking wizards, and Arjan Thembool. Everyone has been slowly recovering their memory since the death of the monster, a creature which the sages classify most closely as a ‘raknid,’ a species of subterranean insect. Oddly, raknids do not usually have tentacles growing over their faces and have never demonstrated mind-control powers, but since the gas dissolves much of the specimen, examination has been difficult.
After the (very soggy) Dwarvish documents were magically restored and translated, they revealed the Dwarves’ plans. They had been trying to steal a small collection of spellbooks being transported through the festival, and had smuggled in the raknid egg to cause enough of a disturbance that they’d be able to get the books and escape without notice. Arjan, to his credit, only thought he was smuggling in an illegal pet, not a magical monster. Raknid eggs glow with dim magic, so apparently the newly-hatched raknid grabbed the nearest glowing sphere and tried to hatch it as an egg.
While the raknid did manage to provide the distraction the Dwarves wanted, things could have gone much worse if Harley and James (and the head) hadn’t stopped the creature. They probably saved hundreds of lives, including those of the candidates for the leadership of the Arcane Academy. They promise to owe the two of them a favor, and they gladly overlook all the crimes they committed for the sake of saving the day (theft, assault, theft, vandalism, theft, etc.).
Finally, one of the wizards promises that he will contact them in a few days with a potential job offer, if they’re interested. The Dwarves managed to get away with most of the books, but one had not yet reached the fair, so someone will need to pass on the bad news to the buyer. The pay should be good.
Harley smiles in thanks, and James shrugs. “I’m just here to fight stuff and make money. If there’s nothing left to fight, we might as well make some money.”
When we first started in Spring of 1999, none of my players had much experience with AD&D, so the prologue was run with minimal prep time, using a pre-published adventure adapted from the game world of Talislanta. It sets the stage for the rest of the storyhour, and I trust you'll be pleased to learn that this will probably be the longest of any of the posts you'll see.
We gamed from Spring of '99 until summer of 2000, when Jessie decided she wanted to run Savannah Knights. Sorry, I just wanted to tell you how impressed I am with Jessie's DMing skill since she'd only been a player for just over 1 year.
Now I'm done setting up the story. I hope you enjoy the prologue, and don't worry. Most of the posts won't be this long. Oh, and if you read the Savannah Knights storyhour (which I played in), then hopefully you'll like this one also.
See the High Fantasy website for more information.
Prologue: The Mystery at the Magical Fair
Dramatis Personae:
Hera “Harley” Fyana—1st level Vaneljesti Elvish thief (2nd edition) or 1st level Vaneljesti Elvish bard (3rd edition), played by Jessica Jones
James T. Rocket—1st level half-Innenlesti Elvish fighter, played by Nic Bumpus
Cast of Thousands—played by the DM, RangerWickett
The Magical Fair of Lyceum is one of the few times when magic-users are able to freely share and display their talents to the world. The Arcane Academy, located in the Nozama Empire capital city of Lyceum, hosts the Magical Fair every seven years to attract all sorts of magicians, sorcerers, spiritualists, shamans, and charlatans for the purpose of delighting in the powers of magic. Lyceum grudgingly allows the festival because of the trade it brings in, though the average citizen must for decency’s sake hide his or her interest in attending the fair.
Vendors hawk their wares, talismancers charm and protect the superstitious, wizards sell their knowledge, and magi of all sorts dazzle audiences with performances ranging from the acrobatic to the militant. Amid the throngs of thousands who exhibit or attend the festival, tensions are often high, so the Arcane Academy makes sure to hire fair guards that can blend showmanship with their duty to protect the peace. Many are attracted by the promise of easy payment for simply breaking up the occasional fight, since the Academy mages handle all sorcerous disruptions, but some fair guards participate because of curiosity. Unlike the typical atmosphere of the Nozama Empire, Lyceum’s Magical Fair openly welcomes non-humans, mostly just because many fair-goers can’t tell the difference between the genuine and the illusory.
The Fairkeepers know that the crowds like spectacles, so hiring privileges go first to those with dazzling looks, and next to those with dazzling skills. Somewhere further down the line comes the need for cheap muscle. In the interest of balance, the Fairkeepers usually assign pairs together that can complement each other. Such is the case with one of the most distinctive pairs of fair guards.
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The fifth night of the week-long fair, a theft occurred in a merchant’s stall. The chief fairguard assigns two of his most productive and popular guards so far to handle the investigation.
James T. Rocket stands out in the crowd in nearly every imaginable way, so most of the festival-goers assume he’s somehow magically costumed. Nearly six-and-a-half feet tall, James dresses in well-worn yet still gleaming chainmail, covered with simple yet fashionable clothes. He wears a longsword and a shield, and has already garnered a reputation at the fair by cutting off the leg of a thief who tried to steal wares from a magic shop. The cost to pay for the girl’s healing was taken from James’ wages. James has pure white hair and purple irises, and the slant of his eyes and slightly pointed ears indicate him as a half-Elf. He looks almost perpetually bored, except for when talking to his fellow guard and new friend, Harley.
Harley stands out just as easily, though in vivid contrast with James. Barely over five feet tall, Harley’s unearthly grace and slender form mark her unmistakeably as an Elf. She normally attempts to hide her pointed ears under her red-brown hair, but at the festival she basks in the surprised gazes of the fair-goers. Her skill at prestidigitation, which she’ll gladly display to anyone who seems interested, has convinced most of the normal citizens of Lyceum that Harley must be a disguised sorceress. That doesn’t stop men from staring at her immodestly and women from staring at her jealously.
Their superior assigns James and Harley to check out the scene of the crime, a pavilion stall called “The Burning Sky” (a reference to an ancient magical torch), owned by a man named Arjan Thembool. The shop specializes in light-generating and sun-motif merchandise, magical or mundane in nature, and Harley and James arrive, appropriately, right at sunrise.
Arjan Thembool is from Kequalak, a northern nation generally disliked in Nozama, but neither James nor Harley are locals, so they listen to the man without prejudice. Arjan explains that he arrived about an hour before sunrise to get ready for the fair’s opening when he discovered that his stall had been vandalized during the night. He’s angry, but not hysterical, but he seems to grow frustrated by James’ lack of emotion. James cooly asks for the merchant to tell them everything that’s out of order.
Arjan takes them inside his pavilion as the first of the day’s fairgoers begin to filter into the festival. A moat surrounds the entire festival field, with only one bridge allowing entrance. Arjan’s pavilion is exactly opposite of the bridge, located on the far side of the fair, right next to the moat, so it will be a few minutes before any customers arrive.
The merchant holds the flap of the tent open for Harley to enter first, and she stops in surprise at the brightness of the interior. Hundreds of small curios shed soft white glows, contributing to filling nearly the entire tent with light. Only one far corner is dimmed in shadow. As Harley, James, and Arjan walk into the tent, Harley comments that he was just asking to be robbed, since his must have been the only shop that was lit up last night. He made it easy for the thieves. Arjan frowns at this, and gets back to business, pointing out what was damaged or stolen. A faint murmuring fills the room, and Harley glances around for its source while Arjan explains the theft.
Almost all the damage took place in the darker corner of the room, where most of the light-shedding objects are broken or missing. The first was a tiny clockwork Dragon that breathed illusory flames every hour; its head and neck were ripped apart, and the rest of its gears lay strewn across the floor. A rack of Tundanesti Elvish scimitars, all enchanted to glow dimly, was knocked onto the floor. Arjan had a vase filled with glowing fluid set atop the rack, so it is shattered also, and a hideously smelling gunk has tarnished the scimitar blades and ruined an elaborate carpet on the floor. Additionally, the rug has been slashed repeatedly, all the strokes going the same direction. Numerous other small objects fell onto the floor when the rack was knocked over, but nothing of value.
The only object that appears to have been stolen was an amberglass sphere, roughly a foot across, filled with an alchemical gas called Yellow Peril. The poisonous gas is primarily used to kill vermin, but because it has a side effect of faint luminesence, Arjan owned a sphere of it for his shop. He knows of how dangerous the gas is (if the sphere broke it would easily kill anything within 20 feet), but the amberglass sphere it contained within is sturdy enough to resist shattering while dropped. As an added precaution, he even had anti-theft enchantments placed upon it for the duration of the fair, so he would know if it left the fairgrounds. Whoever the thieves are, they haven’t gone far.
While Harley and James discuss who they need to talk to as far as figuring out who’d want to steal the sphere and why, and whether it would’ve been possible to remove the anti-theft enchantment, the murmuring in the room grows louder. Arjan raises his voice slightly and suggests that they should leave, since obviously one of his magical wares is going awry, but James waves him off. The two guards scour the shop for the source of the noise, and they finally pinpoint it as coming from overhead, from an unlit lantern. James climbs onto an unsturdy table and reaches for the lantern.
He opens it, and sees inside a small, shrunken head. A shrunken Goblin head, its eyes shut and skin taut. As soon as he sees the lantern, however, the murmuring stops, and James looks down to Harley and shrugs. He begins to unlatch the lantern from the top of the tent, when suddenly the shrunken head’s eyes snap open and it shouts with a grin, “Boo!”
James doesn’t startle, and though the head begins to giggle at its joke, it looks at James and pouts with a high-pitched voice, “I was scared.”
James glares at the little decapitated talking head in boredom, then glances down to Harley. He notices that Arjan has just slipped out of the tent, and so he shouts for Harley to follow the man. Harley sprints out the back flap of the tent, leaving James to clamber down in his heavy chainmail.
Harley slips through the tent flaps, stopping only inches away from the edge of the fair’s moat. Glancing in either direction, she sees Arjan running away toward the nearest tent. She shouts for him to stop, then hurls at him Ricochet, her chakram (a thin, aerodynamic ring that spins like a combination axe-boomerang; i.e., the thing that Xena uses). Arjan turns at the last moment and tries to avoid the chakram by leaping out of its way. In so doing, he plunges face first into the moat.
Harley, not quite used to being part of a team, leaps after Arjan without telling James where she went. The moat is only ten feet deep, but is easily 30 feet across, so it takes much hassle to pummel Arjan into submission and drag him back to shore. When Harley reaches the edge of the moat, James reaches down and pulls the merchant up, letting his Elvish co-worker get out herself.
Harley, soaking wet, laments that she just lost her only good weapon—the chakram splashed into the moat. She takes out her frustration on Arjan by trying to interrogate him, but the merchant won’t say why he ran. Finally the head, which James is carrying in his free hand, gibbers out, “I’m illegal!”
James and Harley recall that yes, shrunken head fetishes like these are illegal. They trap the spirit of the deceased in its body, creating a minor form of undead. Of course, the Goblin head seems to be enjoying being just a head. It gabs gaily, eyes closed but with a stupid grin on its lips. In a high pitched voice it sings about how it likes fish, and that it’s really dark.
They interrogate Arjan a little longer and get him to admit that he was smuggling in the head to trade to some necromancers. Harley and James discuss what to do, and realize that the head is the only real witness to the crime. It was, afterall, in the tent all last night, so it must have at least heard what was going on during the robbery. They ask it what happened the night before, and it just moans and says that it has a head ache. They decide to take Arjan in first and ask their superior what to do about the head and the stolen Yellow Peril. James, being the stronger of the two, takes Arjan. Harley, meanwhile, stays behind to make sure no one vandalizes the shop. She keeps the head with her so she can try to ask it questions, and so she can dry off without being stared at by half the festival.
While waiting for James to return from the main guardhouse, Harley pries around inside Arjan’s tent to see what else he might have been smuggling in. She doesn’t find anything particularly incriminating, but decides that Arjan owes her for making her jump into the moat, and for causing her to lose her chakram. Thus, she turns the head so it can’t watch her, then pockets a few gold trinkets to make up the difference.
Still waiting for James, she turns a few customers away and spends her time chatting with the head. It can’t remember its name, or how it ended up decapitated, but it mentions repeatedly that it likes fish, and that it wishes that it had some fish. Maybe she could take him to get some fish? Harley declines, and instead tries to ask it who the thief was.
The Goblin head replies, “I heard legs. . . . Lots of legs. I don’t have any legs. Aww. I kinda wish I had legs. Lots of legs. Tick tick tick and a drip drip drip. Tick drip tick.”
The Goblin also chatters about how wet it is. Harley threatens to throw the head into the moat if it doesn’t answer straight, and it replies that it still has a really bad head-ache, but it really hopes she won’t throw him away. He likes talking to her.
Finally, fed up that James is taking so long, Harley pops the head into a satchel and carries it with her as she tromps back to the main guard tent. There she discovers that James doesn’t remember a thing about the head, or about Arjan attacking them. In fact, about a minute or so after leaving Harley and the head, James just let Arjan go. Harley unsuccessfully tries to jog James’ memory, but he suddenly remembers everything as soon as the head begins jabbering again. Feeling somewhat nervous, they put the head back in the bag and talk to their superior.
Their superior is nervous and suggests that the vandalism must have been to cover the theft of the Yellow Peril. They tell him about the head and ask if he wants it, but the head begins blathering that it doesn’t want to go, that it’s not safe, and that it thinks that the darkness inside Harley’s back is so nice and cozy and dark and quiet and ticking and dripping and dark and fishy.
Needless to say, their superior tells them to keep the head.
At his orders, they head out to an alchemist’s shop not too far away. One of the few permanent structures in the fair, it’s a three-story tower where mages from the Arcane Academy display and sell alchemical and magical potions, balms, and oils. Their new mission is to find out about the Yellow Peril and see if anyone in particular would have reason to steal some. They wisely decide to keep the head under wraps, but as they try to enter the alchemist’s pavilion, they get stopped by actual sorcerous security.
(The Magical Fair is both a festival for entertainment, and the convention in which the new president of the Lyceum wizard’s guild is chosen. Throughout the festival, high-ranking members give speeches, engage in spellcraft duels, and generally vie for supremacy. On the sixth day, today, a debate is held with the key contenders, and the winner of the debate has a good chance of being elected.)
Since this is the day that most of the high ranking guild members will be at the fair, the wizards are being extra cautious not to let people cause trouble. The gate guard at the pavilion asks for proof of their employment as guards, and after they give it to him, he begins to review it. The Goblin head begins to chatter, muffled from within the bag, and Harley quickly leans over, opens the bag, and says (a bit too loudly), “Shut up, head!”
The alchemist tower guard looks up and asks what Harley just said. In a stammering explanation, Harley explains that . . . um, yeah, this is my friend . . . ‘Head,’ and she gestures to James.
The wizard seems skeptical, so James adds in that Harley’s nickname is ‘Bottom.’ “Old nicknames from our time together at the academy.”
Then from the satchel comes a high-pitched voice, “He’s Head. She’s Bottom.” Harley quickly impersonates the Goblin’s voice to prove that it was her all along, and they bluff their way into the tower. Within, they go to the third floor laboratory to talk to some alchemists and researchers. They talk to several wizards, all of whom say they’ll get the information that Harley and James want, and will be right back. But none of them come back. Curious, they talk to one of the alchemists they’d already seen, but he doesn’t remember seeing them before. Frustrated, James writes the man a note to carry and read repeatedly. The alchemist shrugs and takes the note, heading off to get the information they want.
Since they imagine it’ll be some time before the wizard gets back, they head downstairs and back into the main festival, hoping to get something to eat while they wait. It’s mid-morning, and they’re hungry.
As they walk around the festival, checking at different stalls for food, they notice that a lot of people seem to have head-aches. When Harley asks the Goblin shrunken head fetish if it has a head-ache, it says yes and moans a little bit. It mutters that it’s hungry too, and that it wants fish, so maybe they could look in the moat for fish. James tells it forcefully no, and so the head resentfully shouts “He’s Head! She’s Bottom!” until they cram a cloth into its mouth to gag it.
Oddly, few people seem to notice this spectacle, and none seem to care for more than a moment. Harley and James get some food, then decide to check to see if Arjan might be back at his stall. Harley wagers that he’s forgotten about them entirely.
They do find him at his stall, but he hasn’t forgotten about them. Instead, he remembers them helping him with moving some items he accidentally dropped on the floor. The man doesn’t recall a theft at all, though. Deciding that maybe Arjan not remembering them is a good thing, Harley asks him about where he’s been lately, and whether any of his goods are missing, and who he was planning to sell to. At this point, Arjan does get nervous, but Harley pretends to think he’s just worried about scaring off customers. Using her charm, she manages to get Arjan to say that he had been asked by some Dwarves to bring some goods into the city.
Remembering their initial tour of the festival, they know that there is a small group of evangelical Dwarves in one of the least-visited corners of the festival, but rather than pursuing that lead immediately, they bid Arjan good day and go talk to their superior again. Consistent with the trend, the man doesn’t remember even sending them to investigate a robbery this morning, but for some reason he is curious about whether they found anything interesting. The whole time they talk to him, he emphasizes the word ‘head’ whenever it crops up in a sentence, and he seems to get angry just saying the word. Thankfully the gag is still working, so the Goblin head can’t reveal itself.
Wanting to get away from their superior before he finds out about the head, they quickly ask a few questions about Dwarves. Since Dwarves aren’t typically wizards, most Dwarves who attempt to rent a stall at the Magical Fair have to have all their gear inspected minutely by Academy officials. After they leave the main guardpost, Harley and James discuss that maybe the Dwarves needed something, but knew they couldn’t smuggle it in themselves, and thus hired Arjan to bring it in for them.
Their last task before going to check out the Dwarves is to return to the alchemists’ tower in the vain hope that perhaps someone found information for them. The guard at the door to the tower (the same one as last time) is belligerent to them for no good reason, just saying that he dislikes all these non-magic-using rabble. Harley decides to bribe him so they can get in without trouble, and they end up waiting on the third floor for someone to speak to them. Most of the wizards in the tower have head-aches, and a few just stare blankly at books, not turning a page in over five minutes.
Glancing around cautiously, James and Harley ungag the Goblin and ask it what the hell is going on. Harley tries to be very soothing with it, promising that they’ll find a way to give him a fish if only he’ll help them out.
It whimpers and says, “You can’t wait, can’t wait, since she’s hid away with a mate. It . . . it wetly ponders . . . and coldly wonders. A darkness . . . and a tick tick tick, in a drip drip drip.” The Goblin sobs, its voice filled with pain as it struggles to finish. “Medals and prizes, medals and prizes. Who will mourn for . . . medals and-”
A wizard comes up behind them and cuts off the Goblin shrunken head. He stares at the little head in wonder, saying that he’s amazed that they have one. He’s never seen one before. He asks if he can take a look at the head very briefly. Harley and James cautiously agree, with the conditions that they always stay within view of the head, and that afterward this wizard will get them some info on Yellow Peril.
The wizard joyfully walks them into a laboratory, carrying the head and prying at it with his fingers. He tells them all he knows about Yellow Peril, including a rudimentary explanation of why it glows. While the wizard talks to them, he puts the head on a countertop to better examine it. The shrunken Goblin head has stopped talking and is just whimpering now, and the two guards are too fed up to really care until they both see the alchemist picking up a glass vial filled with fluid. While still happily chatting with his two guests, the wizard up-ends the vial over the fetish, dumping the fluid on it.
The shrunken head screeches in agony and starts to sizzle, and James and Harley leap forward to stop the wizard from melting the head with acid. James tackles the scrawny alchemist, and Harley snatches up the slowly-dissolving head and splashes it with all the water she’s carrying. James quickly tests a large pitcher to make sure it’s water, and then he throws it onto Harley and the head to wash off the acid. Harley ends up burning her hands slightly, but thankfully the acid was a relatively mild one, so neither she nor the head are permanently damaged. Just wet.
James is about to pummel the alchemist into a pulp for trying to ‘kill’ the undead head, when Harley shouts a warning. A stream of flame flashes across the room, searing the far wall and cracking a large glass window with the heat. Harley and James look up to see about a half-dozen wizards striding into the room, all preparing to cast spells. The small crowd blocks the only stairway down.
Harley desperately throws a few vials of funky potions and liquids at the wizards, and then she and James (and the head) make a break for the window. James smashes it apart with his sword, and they both clamber through and leap down. Since the tower is slightly tapered toward the top, they are able to slide to the ground with minimal injury, and once back on their feet they sprint away out of sight of the wizards. James is about to go into a rant about how all the wizards in the city must be out to kill them when the Goblin head starts screaming and whimpering again. Looking around, they see that everyone who can see the head is walking toward them slowly, malevolently.
Harley stuffs the gag back in the Goblin’s mouth to shut it up, and James slams the tiny head back into the satchel. And then they run again, James bum rushing into and knocking down a few scrawny teenagers who were blocking their way.
Once out of sight of the angry mob, they find a shopkeeper who has passed out from a head-ache, and they decide to use his shop (which handily sells healing potions) to hide in. They realize that the evidence points toward the Dwarves being involved, with Arjan as an accomplice, but they can’t figure out what it might be that’s causing everyone to act strangely. The head, when they ungag it, just moans painfully about how much it stinks of fish in the dark, but whenever they try to get it to answer straight, it just whimpers helplessly. Trying to recall all the clues the head had given them, Harley realizes that the head is all that’s keeping them from being controlled by . . . whatever it is.
James agrees, and begins rubbing his head in frustration, starting to feel a headache. Harley is worried, but James tells her it’s not important. “So my head hurts. No big deal. When your bottom starts to hurt, then we should worry.”
They decide to loot a few stores that could prove useful, then confront the Dwarves. They steal a large supply of healing potions, and Harley picks enough pockets (everyone is starting to look comatose) to provide herself with several daggers. They try to be discreet, but since they’re practically the only people in the fair who are even walking anymore, it’s hard to ‘blend in.’ The only movement they see is near the Election Pavilion, where the debates will be held in a few hours. Workers are mindlessly setting up the podium and seats so people can gather and watch. Harley notes that the workers are so numb to their surroundings that the decorations look hideously tasteless.
Walking through the festival, its thoroughfares crowded with sitting or blankly standing people, it takes them nearly half an hour to reach the remote corner of the festival where the Dwarvish ‘church’ is. Even during the days when people weren’t standing around like zombies, the church received very limited attendance, since the Dwarves had tended to heckle most of their visitors into leaving.
Upon seeing the squat stone structure, Harley decides that the best course of action is probably to leave the festival, alert the city guard, and have them handle the problem. To stop her from running, James grabs Harley by the collar and drags her after him.
They stop beside a small tent and peer around the corner to see a trio of Dwarves standing warily around the doorway to their sturdy church. None of them seem to be suffering from head-aches or mind control. James tells Harley to go up and distract the Dwarves, and he’ll sneak around and attack from the side.
Harley walks up boldly, holding a pack of cards in her hands, and tries to impress the Dwarves with a magic trick. She gets about five seconds into the trick before the Dwarves draw forth small axes hidden in their cloaks and attack. Harley is down to 2 hit points before James leaps into the fray. The half-Elven fighter takes out two of the Dwarves, but the third one runs into the building, shouting to sound the alarm. Since James is busy finishing off his second Dwarf, Harley gives chase, rushing into the building.
Inside, in the near-dark, she sees two more Dwarves climbing out of a hole in the floor, and after a moment all three Dwarves begin to advance on her, talking amongst themselves in Dwarvish. Harley shouts for them to drop their weapons, or she’ll have to kill them with her banshee wail.
The Dwarves just laugh and start to rush forward, but Harley plucks the head from her satchel, yanks the gag out of its mouth, and hurls the gibbering, shrieking head at the Dwarves. The Dwarves scream in fright and duck to the ground as the Goblin head sails over them, and before they can get up, Harley manages to stab one in the chest. James enters the room while the Dwarves get their bearings again, and in a few minutes (this was 2nd edition, where a round was a minute long), the battle is over. A quick search of the room uncovers several sheafs of paper covered in Dwarven print, plus a large map of the festival grounds. Since neither of them can read the Dwarvish, James tucks the pages into his vest for later perusal.
Harley and James drink healing potions, then recover (and re-gag) the head and sneak through the trap door in the floor. Underground they hear a steady thrumming that dampens the noise of James trying to move silently in chainmail. A ladder leads down into a dark, roughly-dug cavern. Picks and shovels still lie on the floor near the ladder, so it appears that the cavern was just dug this week during the festival, a fact which is rather amazing, since the cavern is about five feet round, stretching for several hundred feet into the darkness. They move down the tunnel and come to a large room, in the center of which they can barely make out a gathering of at least a dozen Dwarves standing around what appears to be a large chest. The cavern is wide enough, and the odd thrumming is loud enough, that Harley and James manage to swing around the Dwarves to the far side of the tunnel, hoping to explore deeper while avoiding a fight. There are three tunnels that lead into the room—one they just came through, and two others.
James’ head-ache intensifies, and Harley begins to feel a slight pain as well, and the muffled Goblin head begins trying to shout. One of the Dwarves happens to spot them at the edge of the cave, and the whole group of Dwarves begins to scramble. The chest they had been standing around gets picked up and carried away down a side tunnel by a handful of Dwarves, while the rest begin to charge after the intruders. Panicking, Harley runs down the tunnel that the Dwarves did not go down, and James follows.
After a few dozen feet, they come to a dead end. The tunnel ends in a ten-foot across pool of water which rapidly rises, then falls, accompanied by the thrumming that has filled the underground complex. Confused, they’re about to turn and get ready to fight when Harley sees a round metallic object washed up on the shore of the pool. It’s Ricochet, her chakram. She quickly realizes that after it fell into the moat, it must have been sucked into here, and the only way that could have happened is if the pool here connects to the moat somehow. She only has time to shout for James to follow before she leaps into the pool and swims for her life.
They have a hard time clambering through the dirty moat water, a task made even more wretched because bits of fishes float in the murk. When they finally splash to the surface and pull themselves ashore, James and Harley check to make sure the head is still with them. It is, safe in its pack, trying to swallow a fish head.
Muttering about how she’s gotten drenched three times in one day, Harley gets to her feet and then gasps. The entire festival, every single person and a few pets and mounts, are heading in a single direction. Harley asks James again if it’s really a good idea to try to solve this themselves, but James grabs her shirt’s collar as a warning, telling her that it looks like time is running out.
Weaving through the slowly-moving crowd, Harley and James spy the Dwarves in the distance, heading for the main debate pavilion. Before they can get too close, however, the crowd starts to surround them, and James regretfully has to bash a few people’s faces to clear a path. They cut through tents and try to take every feasible shortcut, but by the time they reach the podium, the Dwarves are no where to be seen.
A crowd gathers in the seats set up for the debate, and several elderly wizard-looking people stand on the stage and yell at each other nearly incomprehensibly. Harley and James both feel the sudden urge to sit down and watch the show, and their head-ache intensifies as the Goblin begins to shout in pain, “It’s dark and safe, so loud so loud! Wet and safe. . . . Safe for a mate in a ball of gold, which you break and your body goes cold.”
Hearing that the Goblin head is starting to sound weaker and weaker, they look around for any sign of what the shrunken head might be talking about. The only wet thing they see is the moat. And a small drainage ditch that runs from the moat to the debate pavilion. Normally it would direct rainwater into the moat, but there must definitely be someplace wet under the pavilion.
Patting the Goblin’s head to keep it talking and to try to sooth its pain, Harley heads for one side of the ditch while James comes in from the other. They both rush through the blank-eyed crowds and duck low to crawl into the space beneath the stage. James tears away a curtain shroud, and sunlight streams in brightly.
A hiss comes from the darkness, and as their eyes adjust, James and Harley both see a creature crouching in a corner of the stage’s framework. The monster is at least three feet long, with a half-dozen sharp-tipped legs supported a bloated and chitinous body. Milky white eyes stare at them as the creature cringes, holding a foot-long sphere that glows with a dim yellow light. Several short tentacles writhe beneath the creature’s eyes, carressing the egg-shaped globe of Yellow Peril. The glass of the sphere seems worn and scratched, since the creature had been rubbing and scratching it constantly.
Harley realizes what it’s trying to do, and she takes a step back in worry. Remembering that Arjan had said that another fluid-filled sphere had been shattered the night before, she correctly guesses that it must have been this creature’s egg. She tells James that the thing must think the sphere of Yellow Peril is another egg, one for a mate.
As soon as she finishes warning James, the head begins to moan, then shriek, and the insectile creature rushes forward, hissing and lashing out with one long forelimb, while the other cradles the sphere to its chest. The creature attacks James, tearing through his chainmail with its sharp, scythe-like leg. James and Harley both leap out from under the stage and try to get room enough to fight, and the monster follows them. The creature apparently can’t maintain its telepathic control while fighting, and the entire audience of several hundred begins to clamber around in panic, many people surrounding Harley and James as they try to fight the creature.
Harley feels pain wash over her mind as the monster glares at her, tentacles writhing. James leaps forward and tries to hack at it, but his sword bounces off the tough exoskeleton. The small creature, barely larger than an average dog, slashes out again and cuts across the flesh of James’ belly, nearly cutting him open.
Harley, shaking off the pain, weakly tries to throw daggers at the monster, but they also just bounce off its shell. The crowd forces one fairgoer too close to monster, and the critter rears up and scrapes across the man’s lower body, knocking him to the ground. James again tries to hack at the monster, but his blade skitters off the creature’s back. The fairgoer screams as the monster lashes the flesh from his face with its tentacles, and James tries one more futile time to wound the animal.
Harley, seeing that the monster is too tough to hurt, remembers Arjan telling them that Yellow Peril is used to kill vermin, and she grabs a tent pole from a nearby pavilion, shouting for everyone to run. James looks at Harley in dismay, calls her an idiot, and runs.
The monster, finished killing the helpless citizen, cringes as Harley charges toward it. Harley raises the wooden pole over her head and swings down at the monster, aiming not for its shell, but for the sphere of Yellow Peril. With a heavy smash, the sphere shatters, and a thick, smoky yellow gas spews upward, directly into the creature’s face. The monster shrieks animalistically, and from Harley’s pack comes the Goblin’s voice as it screams in agony too. Harley nearly collapses as pain floods through her, but James grabs her and pulls her away as the thick, deadly fumes spread across the ground.
Everyone runs away in panic, spreading far enough away so the Yellow Peril dissipates into the air. James checks on the head, and finds it inert, its eyes closed and its mouth open in a peaceful, moronic grin. Not too far away, the small monster chokes to death as the toxic gas disintegrates its flesh.
__________________________________________________
In the aftermath of the day’s events, James and Harley are called to a meeting with their superior, a few high-ranking wizards, and Arjan Thembool. Everyone has been slowly recovering their memory since the death of the monster, a creature which the sages classify most closely as a ‘raknid,’ a species of subterranean insect. Oddly, raknids do not usually have tentacles growing over their faces and have never demonstrated mind-control powers, but since the gas dissolves much of the specimen, examination has been difficult.
After the (very soggy) Dwarvish documents were magically restored and translated, they revealed the Dwarves’ plans. They had been trying to steal a small collection of spellbooks being transported through the festival, and had smuggled in the raknid egg to cause enough of a disturbance that they’d be able to get the books and escape without notice. Arjan, to his credit, only thought he was smuggling in an illegal pet, not a magical monster. Raknid eggs glow with dim magic, so apparently the newly-hatched raknid grabbed the nearest glowing sphere and tried to hatch it as an egg.
While the raknid did manage to provide the distraction the Dwarves wanted, things could have gone much worse if Harley and James (and the head) hadn’t stopped the creature. They probably saved hundreds of lives, including those of the candidates for the leadership of the Arcane Academy. They promise to owe the two of them a favor, and they gladly overlook all the crimes they committed for the sake of saving the day (theft, assault, theft, vandalism, theft, etc.).
Finally, one of the wizards promises that he will contact them in a few days with a potential job offer, if they’re interested. The Dwarves managed to get away with most of the books, but one had not yet reached the fair, so someone will need to pass on the bad news to the buyer. The pay should be good.
Harley smiles in thanks, and James shrugs. “I’m just here to fight stuff and make money. If there’s nothing left to fight, we might as well make some money.”
