Wing Three

ADVENTURE 62 - BODYSWAPPERS

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A Guild page walked into the Wing Three common area and announced that a letter had arrived for Cal, passed on by a merchant caravan. He handed it over to the eager cleric, nodded his head in acknowledgement, and departed.

Cal opened up the letter, which was sealed with a blob of wax. It read:

Cal,

I caught me the most amazing goat the other day! He was out back, wandering just outside of the goat pens, and he fought me something fierce, but I wrestled him into the pens with all the other goats. He walks funny, kind of like he's unsure of his footing (which itself is pretty weird for a goat), and he spends most of the day pacing back and forth, back and forth. He sometimes makes funny marks in the ground with his hoof, kind of like he's writing, but it’s like no writing I ever seen before. Maybe you should come on down here the next time you're in the area and see for yourself. (If you do come, try and bring that Delfine chick with you – she was pretty hot! She isn’t attached to anybody yet, is she?)

Anyway, hope to see you soon. I'm thinking I'm gonna name the new goat "Pacer." Or maybe "Hobbles."

Your Brother,

Trip

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"Gear up!" called Cal to the others. "We're off to go visit my brother Trip!"

- - -

The trip to Trip's was uneventful. As the five adventurers headed up the path to Trip's goat farm, the goatherder must have seen them from his window, for he exited the front door and walked out to greet them. He shook each of the heroes' hands in turn, taking a noticeable longer time with Delphyne's. Then he slapped his brother Cal on the back, and said, "I reckon you'd all like to see that goat I found." Trip ushered the group around the house to the goat pen out back. "I decided to name him 'Scribe,' since he spends most of his day scratching around in the ground like he's writing. Hey, you know of any circuses around here what might like to buy an educated goat?"

Trip's goat pen easily held two dozen goats, but one in particular was standing apart from the others, scratching furiously into the ground. Trip led the group into the pen, closing the gate behind them, and they walked over to look at Scribe's scratchings. "Oh dear," said Delphyne, looking down at the markings in the dirt. "That's the Giant language." She didn't like accessing the memories implanted in her head by Hagatha, but stored there was a full understanding of the Giant language.

"What's it say?" asked Cal.

Delphyne translated, word for word. Scribe had written:

YOU CRETINOUS OAF! IF I WERE IN MY ORIGINAL BODY I WOULD RIP YOUR ARM OUT OF ITS SOCKET AND SLAP YOUR STUPID FACE SILLY WITH YOUR OWN FLOPPING HAND! THERE ARE OTHER LANGUAGES THAN YOUR OWN HUMAN SCRIPT – AT LEAST RECOGNIZE THIS AS ANOTHER LANGUAGE AND SEND FOR HELP FROM THOSE MORE LIKELY TO UNDERSTAND, YOU IGNORANT BUMPKIN!

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As Delphyne read the goat's message aloud, its author looked up and bleated excitedly. "...So, you're not in your original body?" asked Delphyne in the Giant tongue. The goat shook his head vigorously from side to side.

"Who are you?" asked Delphyne, again in the same language.

The goat trotted over to a blank patch of dirt and started scratching out letters with his hoof. "'Bjorn Gundarson,'" read Delphyne.

The interrogation continued. Over time, Delphyne learned the following: Bjorn was a frost giant, whose body was swapped with that of the goat by a trio of wizards - "little guys," so presumably halflings or gnomes - who lived in a stone giant lair up in the mountains. They did that to make the frost giant body easier to control, so that one of them in turn could bodyswap into the frost giant's body, leaving his own body with the intellect of a goat. (They found that a goat can get into much less trouble than a frost giant - or a stone giant, for that matter.) Their original plan was to slay Bjorn once he was in the goat's body, but Bjorn was having none of that and he escaped before they could catch him. He wandered around the mountain looking for someone who could possibly reverse the transformation, but then he was captured by the oafish Trip, who seemed to treat Bjorn as some sort of novelty trick animal rather than seeing the situation for what it really was. Bjorn volunteered to lead the group back to the stone giant lair where the three wizards were currently located. Hopefully, they'd be able to defeat the wizards and restore Bjorn to his rightful body. Bjorn just wanted his own body and gear back – and the wizards responsible for his current predicament dead. The group was more than welcome to any treasure the wizards might have accumulated.

"Time out," called Chalkan. "Why are we helping a frost giant, again?"

"These wizards aren't up to any good," pointed out Delphyne. "We can assume they wanted the giant bodies so that they'd have more powerful forms, and the whole body-stealing business sounds pretty evil. I think we need to put a stop to them."

"Agreed," said Cal.

"Normally, I'd say we should go ask the Council for help," added Trip. "This valley is nominally ruled by the Council of Four, a bunch of wizards and druids who pretty much act as our leaders. Only, nobody's seen them for a couple of weeks. So I guess we're it. And by 'we,' I mean 'you,'" admitted the goatherder sheepishly. "I leave all that hero stuff to you folks. Let me know how it goes, though."

Bjorn had another warning to give out before they left. There was a large, three-headed monster who acted as a guard-beast for the wizards; they'd have to be on the watch for it as they approached the stone giant den. Then he was eager to be off, to fetch his original body back. Trip let him out of the pen, and the group followed the goat as he headed unerringly for the nearby mountains.

About halfway up the mountain, Chalkan spotted a winged creature streaking down from the sky above. At first it looked to be a bluish-green dragon with a wingspan of about 40 feet; then he noticed the beast's other two heads – one that of a lion, the other that of a goat, each larger than it had any right to be – and the elven arcane archer recognized that the group was up against some sort of monstrous chimera. The fact that this was no ordinary chimera was driven home not only by the creature's enormous size, but also by the fact that its tail seemed to be an enormous serpent of some type.

Chalkan notched an arrow into Rilisivae Athelgala and called out a warning to the others. His arrow struck true, driving deep into the space between the throats of the lion and goat, and then the dire chimera landed before the group, breathing out a cloud of poisonous gas. Bjorn instantly keeled over, while the heroes scattered out of the edges of the cloud of vapors. Delphyne leaped upon her broom of flying and flew straight up, out of the creature's reach - at least, unless it decided to take flight again. Chalkan continued peppering it with arrows, while Cal cast a flame strike down from the heavens. Telgrane popped open his tinder box and allowed Infernia to join the fray; she happily scampered off to the dire chimera's rear end, secure in the knowledge that no matter how poisonous the serpent's venom might be, she was immune to it. Thunderwolf stepped up to attack the goat's head with his longsword, deeming it the least powerful of the creature's flanks.

The battle was furious, and each side inflicted a considerable amount of damage upon the other before the dire chimera decided it had had enough; after all, it had accomplished its main objective, slaying the goat that had escaped from its masters. Now its duty was clear: since it was having a tough time killing off these adventurers, it had to report back to its wizardly masters, so they could prepare themselves for a battle against these powerful foes who were obviously on their way to the stone giant den. The dire chimera once again took wing...

...but it had tallied too long, and it was taken down by a combined blast of offensive spells by Delphyne, Telgrane, and Cal before it could fly out of range. It crashed back down to the ground in a bone-jarring thud and landed in a heap. Cal called for a rest and delivered healing spells to those who needed them, while Thunderwolf confirmed that Bjorn was indeed dead.

"Well, good!" commented Chalkan. "I didn't really want to give a frost giant his body back, anyway. That's just asking for trouble."

The group continued up the mountain. Lacking Bjorn's lead, they deemed it best to continue in the direction they'd been heading and hope that the stone giant den became obvious when they got there.

It didn't, but for a good reason: the once enormous cave opening had been reshaped by the wizards who took over the lair, covering it with a wall of natural-looking stone in the front, so that from head-on it looked like there was no opening at all; the twin openings were at the side, hidden from view. The group had no indication that they were practically on top of the stone giant den - until a hill giant seemed to step out of the very rock to urinate against a boulder.

The adventurers stopped in their tracks and stared in shock at the hill giant. The hill giant, for his part, showed no less surprise at the sudden appearance of a quintet of heavily-armed heroes climbing up the mountainside, and quickly refocused his attention from his breech-cloth to the heavy club he gripped in one meaty fist. He turned his head and called over his shoulder in a language none of the heroes recognized, and then charged down the slope at them, grinning evilly.

Cal and Thunderwolf ran up to meet the hill giant's charge, while the others held back. Delphyne remained on her broom, and Telgrane cast a Rary's telepathic bond spell to ensure the heroes would remain in contact with each other, when a troll popped into view from the mountain ahead of them. This troll was an odd-looking one, with what looked like a wide variety of swords and daggers tied to its fingers. It loped down the slope at the heroes as well.

Thunderwolf gulped down his fear - this was the first troll he'd ever faced, and he'd heard they were powerful foes. Then a voice suddenly called in his head: "Thunderwolf, you must save me from this brute!" The young hero looked around, but saw nobody who could have called out to him. "I'm here, in the troll's hand!" replied the voice in response to Thunderwolf's apparent confusion.

The two forces met with a clash of weapons. The hill giant bashed at Cal with his oversized club, but the cleric dodged to the side and brought his mace crashing up into the creature's temple, bloodying it and causing it to stagger to the side. Cal noticed a falchion strapped to the belt of its breech-cloth, sized for use by a human, and mentally shrugged - maybe the hill giant used it as Cal would a hunting knife, who knew? Telgrane, meanwhile, estimated that casting a fireball at the troll would likely get Thunderwolf as well, and opted to summon a Huge fire elemental instead. As the creature of flames manifested and started swiping at the green-bodied monster, Thunderwolf flanked the troll and attacked it with a flurry of sword-thrusts. Infernia raced up to attack the troll as well, realizing her fiery body would be useful against the troll's regenerative powers. Delphyne shot a few magic missiles into the hill giant for good measure, and between her spells and Cal's mace, the hill giant soon fell over, dead. Cal then turned to face the troll, and Delphyne, seeing that the others should have the troll easily handled, flew her broom into the cavern's side-facing entrance. Telgrane followed.

Doing so, she missed it as the slain hill giant's body ripped open in a sluice of blood and gore, and out stepped a furious-looking orc. "You sonsabitches!" it cried aloud in the Common tongue. "I liked that body!" And with that, it picked up the falchion and raced over to attack Cal.

Thunderwolf, Infernia, and the Huge fire elemental had by this time finished off the troll. The two fire elementals followed Telgrane into the cave, the light from their flames providing illumination within. Thunderwolf, heeding the voice in his head, scrambled to untie the blades from the troll's fingers, focusing on one particular sword: the one who had been calling to him telepathically. "Excellent!" it cried as Thunderwolf grasped the longsword in his hand. "I was sullied by the touch of that upright beast! But together, you and I will do mighty things! I am called Xanthros."

Thunderwolf, awestruck at the thought of possessing an intelligent blade, almost didn't notice when the troll's body split open and a hobgoblin stepped out from its remains. But at Xanthros's warning, the young fighter leapt back in the nick of time, and he found himself in furious battle with the hobgoblin, who had picked up a longsword from one of the troll's fingers. "You'll pay for that, human!" the hobgoblin snarled.

Inside the cave, Delphyne and Telgrane heard a babble of voices, simultaneously calling for rescue, escape, and to be put out of their misery. The cacophony came from a side cavern which was penned off with a metal fence; behind it stood a dire goat, upon whose side had been grafted the heads of three humans and a half-elf.

"Kill me!" pleaded Travolleon Trackfinder. "Free me from this abomination!"

"Lead us away from here!" commanded Sambiollus, the second head from the front. "Quickly, before the giants get hungry and eat us!"

"Do not be so hasty!" Cambrux chided the first head. "With magic, all things are possible! I'm sure there must be a way to restore us to our proper forms, given time."

"You three have it easy," complained Girant Fisherking. "I'm the one closest to the goat's hindquarters, and its flatulence is truly horrid to behold!"

"Baa," bleated the dire goat, irritated at the constant bickering of the four heads grafted onto its side.

"Bleah," grimaced Delphyne, looking at the abomination standing before her.

"We'll have to come back for you," promised Telgrane, noticing that Thunderwolf was in deadly combat with some hobgoblin - just where had he come from? But he seemed to be holding his own, and the conjurer could see Cal finishing off an orc, only to have a halfling climb out of the orc's split-open body. "This is getting ridiculous!" Cal called out, as he slammed the little halfling with his mace, just as the little fellow was loading up a sling. Thunderwolf stood above the slain hobgoblin with Xanthros raised, and sure enough, its body split open as well, revealing another halfling fighter. Thunderwolf cut him to ribbons before he could do much more than stand up.

There were two other passageways leading deeper in the mountain from the entrance chamber; one led to a pair of rough beds, apparently the dwelling of the two nested halfling fighters, while another - scouted out by Infernia, at her master's bidding - led to a natural pool of water and a bunch of supplies in a cavern beyond that. There were no other enemies to be seen. Infernia returned to the entrance cavern.

"They're up there," pointed out one of the dire goat's extra heads, looking up at the ceiling of the central chamber. "Be careful; there are three of them, a frost giant and two stone giants, but they're really all halfling wizards." The group looked up, and saw a series of giant-sized handholds carved into the sides of the cavern wall, forming a ladder of sorts - but one more suited to the form of a stone giant.

"I can carry one other on my broom," suggested Delphyne.

"The clock's ticking on my Huge fire elemental," pointed out Telgrane. "We'll head on up, and meet you guys there." And with that, he cast a dimension door on himself and the two fire elementals.

"The rest of us are still going to need to get up there somehow," remarked Cal, looking up the shaft leading to the upper level. "I'm going to get better-suited to use that ladder." And with a quick enlarge person spell, his muscular form took on giant proportions.

Telgrane and the elementals found themselves in a large cavern, with several tunnels leading elsewhere on the upper level. Standing just around the corner of the entry shaft from the lower level was a stone giant with its greatclub raised, ready to crash down upon the head of the first hero to climb up the shaft. Behind him stood another, eagerly anticipating clobbering the intruders as they approached the upper level. The Huge fire elemental attacked the first stone giant, who whipped around to face this sudden threat. Telgrane and Infernia focused their attention on the second one, and neither giant seemed to appreciate the tables being turned on them in this fashion. In fact, the first one had had enough of the Huge fire elemental's attacks, and cast a dimension door to the presumed safety of the lower level.

That turned out to not have been as safe as he had planned. Cal was about a third of the way up the shaft when he heard Delphyne's surprised scream as the stone giant suddenly appeared in her midst and took a swipe at her with its club. At his size, Cal was sure he could handle the fall, so he leaped off the wall of the shaft and landed behind the stone giant as it threatened Delphyne, Chalkan, and Thunderwolf. The stone giant wasn't particularly pleased to have escaped a Huge fire elemental only to find himself embroiled in a fight against four seasoned adventurers - one of them as big as he was - but it did what it could against them.

Meanwhile, the remaining stone giant on the upper level wasn't enjoying getting battered by a Huge fire elemental any more than the first one did. Fortunately for him, reinforcements were at hand. A frost giant entered the chamber from another one of the side passages. This was likely Bjorn's original body, but Telgrane knew its original owner no longer had any use for it, and blasted away with a fireball straight at its chest. The frost giant roared in pain. Upon Telgrane's command, he and the Huge fire elemental changed foes; Telgrane focused his attention on the stone giant, while the Huge fire elemental and Infernia took on the frost giant - whose body, the conjurer well knew, was particularly vulnerable to fire-based attacks.

Down below, the stone giant - in reality, a halfling wizard by the name of Cubbert Bumblebuskin - was quickly coming to the realization that he had bitten off more than he could chew. When he tried using the massive strength of his powerful stone giant body, he was outclassed against a cleric of Kord his own relative size. When he tried backing off and casting spells - as he would be forced to do were he in his normal halfling body - he was peppered with arrows by the half-elf and spells by the human woman. And the fighter kept rushing up and attacking him with the familiar-looking sword, no matter what he did. It was frustrating! Maybe he was better off taking his chances with the Huge fire elemental up above - at least there, he had allies! He stepped back and cast his last dimension door, escaping back to the relative safety of the upper caverns.

Cal cast a couple of quick healing spells on those who needed them, then resumed his climb up the vertical shaft. Delphyne waved Thunderwolf over to her and had him jump on the broom behind her, ready to transport him up to the upper level where all of the action was currently taking place. Chalkan opted not to wait and stowed his bow over his shoulder and started climbing the giant-spaced handholds, having a fairly difficult time of it but determined to make it nonetheless.

At about the same time that Cubbert had decided he'd be better off on the upper level, the frost giant - whose actions were currently controlled by a halfling wizard named Dobie Smoketallow - had come to the opposite conclusion. The Huge fire elemental had been taking quite a toll on him, and he needed some time to recuperate if he was going to make it through this battle alive. He cast a dimension door on himself, and was suddenly down at the bottom of the vertical shaft, about eye level with Delphyne, who had just started piloting her broom of flying up the shaft. Dobie swatted the broom, sending Thunderwolf toppling down to the stone floor and bouncing Delphyne off a wall to follow suit. Chalkan, halfway up the shaft, saw that his friends were in trouble below; unable to use his bow with only one hand free, he jumped down at the frost giant, pulling out his longsword during his descent. He landed on the frost giant's shoulder and got a fairly deep stab in with his sword before toppling off himself. Cal was nearly at the top of the shaft by that time, so he climbed up and into the upper level's main chamber.

The Huge fire elemental had lost his frost giant combatant and turned to see who else was available. "Oh, no!" cried Cubbert, seeing that he was apparently "it" again. He dashed to a smaller side chamber to the south, the Huge fire elemental in hot pursuit. Telgrane and Infernia were holding their own against the second stone giant - this one controlled by a halfling wizard named Billibew Inkwell - and the sudden addition of an extra-large Cal did nothing to help Billibew's odds.

For several minutes, the sounds of battle echoed from both levels of the stone giant den. Above, Cal, Telgrane and Infernia fought Billibew while the Huge fire elemental and Cubbert battled it out one chamber over; below, Chalkan, Delphyne, and Thunderwolf sparred with Dobie in Bjorn's old body. Each of the halflings-in-giant-bodies started fearing that they might not personally survive the fight, but that only spurred them on to greater efforts.

Dobie was the first to fall. The frost giant's massive form fell to the stone floor with a massive thud, and the heroes readied themselves in case another form would crawl out of Bjorn's body, as the halfling fighters had done outside. But one of the dire goat's extra heads informed the group that while the halfling fighters had each been "nested" into two other, increasingly-larger combat forms, the stone giant and frost giant bodies were merely the result of the swapping of their minds with those of one of the halfling wizard trio. So it looked like the danger was over down here; time to try getting up that shaft to the upper level again.

Chalkan started his slow climb yet again, only to have another stone giant suddenly appear on the lower level. Billibew had had enough of being up against three opponents, and dimension doored his way back to the lower level. Seeing the frost giant's unmoving form on the ground before him, he nearly lost his nerve - If they can do that to Dobie, what are they going to do to me?, he thought - but battled on nonetheless; after all, it wasn't like this was his body. "Not again!" called Chalkan to himself, as he slowly reversed direction one more time and climbed back down the vertical shaft.

Billibew didn't last much longer against the combined might of Chalkan, Delphyne, and Thunderwolf, especially now that he had depleted all of his most powerful spells. He fell to a heap besides Bjorn's slain form, and Chalkan sighed sadly to himself at the thought that now he'd have to try climbing back up that wretched shaft yet again.

Delphyne and Thunderwolf passed him going up the shaft, but doing so turned out not to have been to their advantage. They were about two-thirds of the way up when Cubbert, the last of the halfling wizards, decided that enough was enough. This stupid giant body was on its last legs anyway; he saw the two humans rising up the shaft on a flying broom and came up with a desperate, last-minute ploy. Stepping back, he got a running start and pitched himself forward into the shaft, arms spread wide. As he fell, his giant eyes rolled back into his head as he released mental control of the giant and his mind snapped back to his original body. The stone giant gave a frightened "Baaa!" as the goat's mind reverted to the stone giant's body, and Delphyne did some furious piloting to avoid being hit by the plummeting form of a goat in a stone giant's body. She flew her broom into the side of the wall, and Thunderwolf grabbed onto her shoulders to avoid falling off, but they both avoided the giant - as did Chalkan, by pressing up against the wall of the shaft as the giant plummeted on by. It landed with a heavy thud and didn't move again.

Two of the chambers on the upper level had intricate runes inscribed on overlapping circles etched into their floors; one had two circles (the bodyswapping chamber) and one had three (the nested amalgamations chamber). Another, as-yet-unexplored passageway led to a small chamber, in which three halflings were climbing out of a cage. These were Dobie, Cubbert, and Billibew, back in their original bodies; they caged the bodies when "bodyswapping" with the giants, so the goat minds (goats had been "bodyswapped" with the giants weeks before, then the goats-with-giants'-minds devoured, so that the giants' bodies were easier to manage when the halfling wizards weren't using them) would keep the halfling bodies out of trouble. They were low on spells, but threw a couple of feeble magic missiles at the heroes on the upper level. Telgrane responded with a cloudkill spell that encompassed their small chamber. Furthermore, as the chamber was slightly downhill from the main chamber, the cloudkill had nowhere else to drift, so it remained in the room with the halflings. None of them made it out alive.

After that, it was just a matter of cleanup. A smaller room beyond the bodyswapping chamber had been made into a bedchamber for the halflings when they were in their original bodies, and a small room just beyond that one contained their spellbooks and notes on the bodyswapping and nested amalgamation processes. Telgrane knew that the Guild would be interested in these, and gathered them all up. The room of supplies on the level below looked to have been taken from various caravans; doubtless the halfling wizard trio had engaged in some banditry while wearing their larger bodies. The heroes gathered up the valuables they could find from that storage chamber, then readied themselves for the trek back to Trip's goat farm. They took the dire goat with them, promising the four spellcasters' heads - all that remained of the Council of Four at this point - that the Guild would do what it could to restore them to their proper forms.

Cambrux was ecstatic, and opined that wizardry would soon put everything to rights. Travolleon and Sambiollus were less optimistic, but thanked the adventurers for saving them from being eaten by the giants.

Girant, not surprisingly, spent the entire trip back complaining about the dire goat's flatulence. It was a long trip home.

ADVENTURE 63 - PREEMPTIVE REGICIDE

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NPC Roster:
A Guild page walked into the Wing Three common area and gestured to Galrich. "The Guildmaster wants to see you, alone," he said.

"What for?" asked Galrich.

"I have no idea," admitted the page. "But I was sent to fetch you and bring you to his office. And...he looked kind of mad."

"I'll be comin' with," said Aerik, jumping up to stand beside Galrich.

Galrich puzzled over why Guildmaster Farthingale would be mad at him during their walk to his office. Nothing came immediately to mind. Then he mentally shrugged; he'd find out when he found out.

"Step in here," the Guildmaster said sternly when Galrich approached - he'd been standing at the door, waiting for him. "What I have to say to you is for your ears only. If you wish to share it with Aerik after we've spoken, that's your business," he said, scowling in the direction of the dwarven fighter before returning his attention to Galrich. "Have a seat, I'll be right with you," he said brusquely, closing the door on Aerik so they wouldn't be disturbed. Aerik's hands curled into fists, but he accepted this as the Guildmaster's prerogative, and figured his liege would be safe enough in the midst of the Adventurers Guild Headquarters. Still, he vowed to stand guard immediately outside the door until Galrich's business with the Guildmaster was finished.

Unseen by Galrich, the Guildmaster slipped a disk out from under his vest and applied it to the door. Pressing it in the middle, he activated a rune, which then glowed slightly.

"I have had a serious complaint about you, Galrich, one that paints this entire Guild in a bad light," Farthingale began, his face in a scowl, as he turned to face the seated half-orc. Pulling a folded letter from his vest, he plopped it on his desk in front of the barbarian, then started to pace in agitation. "Go ahead, read the statement for yourself," he said sternly. "I understand that reading is now one of your many abilities."

Galrich had indeed been spending much of his free time with Aerik, who had patiently and painstakingly been teaching the illiterate half-orc how to read. Aerik had started his liege with reading and writing the Common tongue, promising him that once he mastered Common, Aerik would teach him to read, write, and speak Dwarven (and then he'd really be civilized!). Galrich looked down at the letter and read it slowly, moving his lips as he puzzled out its contents. He read:

I wish to rejistir a cumplant agenst galrick the hafeork hu atakt me at the marcit plays thuther day. I wuz minden my one bizniz and lukin at the vejtibulls wen aluvasudin he stept up behined me and grabd my rist and skwiezd it rel tite then spun me arownd and slapt my fays reel hard for no reesin. I todim to stop but he wudint and laft and tod me that nubuddy wood beleev me if I tod anewun and that he wuz a big heero and he cood do wute wantid to and nubuddy cood stop him frum duin whutevr he wantid. So I trida slapim hard onis fays bute grabd my hand and bentit bakwerds an hert my rist and thene skweezd me titer and laft sumor. I no he werks thayr at the gild and I think yo shud fir him or putim in jale so he cant hert enybuddy els.

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Galrich focused on reading the poorly-written note with an intense focus - so intense, in fact, that he failed to notice that Farthingale had stopped his pacing behind Galrich's chair and was standing there, studying him intently. As Galrich continued to read, the portly Guildmaster slowly reached into his vest and pulled out a dagger. It was an ornate-looking dagger, with an oval jewel at the end of its hilt. Having determined the optimal location for a surprise death attack, Farthingale plunged the entirety of the dagger's blade into Galrich's back. The half-orc cried out in alarm and leaped to his feet; Farthingale seemed surprised that the half-orc didn't keel over dead on the spot. Still holding the weapon in his grip, the blade was ripped out of the barbarian's back when Galrich spun around, a look of surprise and fury on his face.

Farthingale spat out a few arcane syllables and disappeared from view.

Galrich tilted his head, and could hear his would-be assassin breathing. So he's just invisible, he hasn't teleported away, Galrich thought. He glanced around the room for a weapon; seeing none, he improvised. Kicking the chair out of his way, he squatted down and lifted Farthingale's desk up and over his head, figuring he could throw it the length of the room and he'd virtually guarantee striking the untrustworthy Guildmaster, invisible or no.

Unfortunately, it was the fake complaint letter that did him in. Unseen, it had slipped to the floor when Galrich first leapt up in surprise. Unnoticed, he had stepped on it when he lifted up the desk. His foot suddenly slipped out from underneath him, and he fell backwards, the heavy desk collapsing on top of him. Galrich roared in frustration and pain; the invisible Farthingale couldn't help but chuckle softly to himself as he studied his oafish foe to line up another assassination attempt.

Meanwhile, outside in the hallway, Aerik stood quietly on his self-imposed guard duty. The disk Farthingale had slipped onto the door not only activated an arcane lock spell, but a localized silence spell as well, ensuring that any sounds made in the Guildmaster's office wouldn't leave the room.

Galrich toppled the desk off of him and stood up, ruining the assassin's plan to stab him in a particularly vulnerable spot. He let his fury guide him (for after all, he had seldom in his life allowed his intelligence to guide him, and it didn't seem like such a great idea to start now), and lifted the desk over his head again for a second attempt. This time he succeeded; throwing the desk the length of the small room hit the invisible Farthingale and sent him toppling; the desk shattered into several pieces as a result. Galrich scooped up a splintered desk leg and wielded it one-handed like a club, sniffing around for his foe.

A chunk of desk went sprawling away, and Farthingale popped into view as he tried stabbing his dagger into Galrich's side. The half-orc dodged the blow and sent the desk leg crashing down onto the Guildmaster's head. Farthingale dropped to one knee, and lost concentration enough to drop his disguise as well, for his features started flowing, and his enormous girth started deflating like a balloon losing air. When he stood up again, he no longer looked like Guildmaster Farthingale, but rather like the doppelganger he truly was.

The doppelganger assassin struck out at Galrich again with the dagger, but Galrich hadn't given him time to prepare for a death-strike, so although the thrust cut deep and caused another heavily-bleeding wound, Galrich still remained on his feet and fighting. He head-butted the assassin, then stabbed the splintered end of the desk leg through the doppelganger's throat, killing him instantly.

Galrich walked calmly to the door and tried to open it. When it resisted, he pulled the disk off the door and flung it aside, then opened the door without a problem.

"So how'd it go?" asked Aerik cheerfully, before getting a good look at Galrich's bleeding form and the completely trashed office behind him. "Moradin's beard!" cried the dwarf. "What happened in here?"

Galrich sent Aerik to go fetch the others, and the dwarf reluctantly raced off to do as he was bid. Cal was off at his temple, but Aerik brought Feron back to heal his wounded liege, and Akari, Rale, and Thunderwolf accompanied the druid to see what had happened to Galrich.

"So...how long has my uncle been a doppelganger?" Thunderwolf wanted to know.

"We don't know that anything's happened to your uncle," replied Feron gently. "The doppelganger probably just assumed his form so he could walk around unimpeded. In fact, we should probably go find out where Farthingale is, and if he's all right."

"On it," said Rale, ducking back out of Farthingale's office. Akari, in the meantime, examined the doppelganger's body. Besides the ominous-looking dagger, he found a medallion around the creature's neck. Pulling it off, he examined it closely. "Any ideas?" he asked to the group at large.

"It's magical," replied Feron, activating a detect magic spell. "Conjuration magic, short-lived. Probably a one-shot teleportation device. And there's something magical on his belt." Tucked inside the doppelganger's belt was a folded-up bag, which quick experimentation proved to be a bag of holding. "So the plan was obviously kill Galrich, stuff his body into the bag of holding, and then use the amulet to teleport to safety. Or maybe to teleport to a specific location, to turn over the body and get paid?" Akari guessed.

About this time Rale returned back. "Farthingale's at a meeting this morning with some of the Guild sponsors," he reported. "He's across town, and if he didn't show, you know those noble types would've been over here bitching about him wasting their valuable time by now. I'm sure he's fine," he concluded to a worried-looking Thunderwolf.

"There you are!" exclaimed a Guild page, approaching Farthingale's office. He had a dwarf in tow, whom Aerik immediately recognized as a member of the Kordovian militia. "Vandergrotten's escaped from his cell, and we think he's off to kill Lord Galrich to prevent him from taking the throne!" exclaimed the tired-looking dwarf, who had ridden nonstop from Kordovia to Greyhawk City to deliver this message.

"How timely," commented Rale.

Still, all of the pieces were falling into place, and a plan of action was quickly decided upon. Feron would use her thousand faces druidic power to look like Farthingale, and use the amulet to teleport to wherever it was preprogrammed to take her, presumably to Vandergrotten. She'd have Galrich playing dead inside the bag of holding, but more importantly she'd have the other heroes hidden inside the Daern's dollhouse in the magical bag, and once they'd made their way to Vandergrotten they'd let him know exactly what they thought of his attempt on Galrich's life. It was as good a plan as they were likely to come up with in what they assumed was limited time; Vandergrotten would no doubt expect his doppelganger assassin to slay Galrich and report back immediately. So the group entered the dollhouse, and Galrich held onto it as he climbed inside the bag of holding.

"The air's all stuffy in here," complained Galrich.

"So hold your breath," suggested Feron, as she morphed her face into the likeness of the Guildmaster. "You won't be in there but a moment." Galrich complied, Feron picked up the magical bag, put the assassin's dagger in her belt, and activated the amulet.

She immediately found herself standing before the raised drawbridge of a small keep, with a 10-foot-wide moat separating her from the stone structure. Several armed individuals stood up at the ramparts of the keep, weapons pointed in her direction.

"Did you get him?" called down a familiar voice from above; Feron recognized it at once as that of Lord Targus Vandergrotten. In response, Feron dropped the bag of holding at her feet and dragged Galrich's prone form out of the opening. His lower half was still in the bag, and nobody could see that he held the Daern's dollhouse in one hand inside the bag.

"I'll send someone down," Vandergrotten called, and in a few minutes the drawbridge started lowering, cresting the moat with a thud. A heavily-armored warrior approached, a cocked crossbow aimed not quite at Feron, but close enough for it to be an unvoiced threat. "Vandergrotten wants the dagger," the warrior said. Without hesistation, Feron handed it over.

The warrior turned it over in one hand. "Ain't the gem supposed to be glowing?" he demanded. "I thought Lord Vandergrotten said the gem was supposed to glow when it had a soul imprisoned in it." He raised the crossbow to point at Feron, still wearing the form of Guildmaster Farthingale, the form the assassin had taken to make his attempt on Galrich's life. Feron remained still, saying nothing. "I'm gonna have to have Vandergrotten look at this. You stay right where you are for now." And the warrior backed cautiously away from Feron, the drawbridge starting to raise once he had made it inside the keep.

"We're busted!" called out Feron to the others, as she shifted into eagle form and flew inside the keep above the closing drawbridge. Galrich immediately sprang to his feet and raced for the drawbridge, leaping onto the edge as it rose and pulling himself up and over it.

Aerik was the first out of the Daern's dollhouse, and he raced after his liege in a doomed attempt to keep up with the headstrong barbarian he was supposed to keep from danger until he assumed the throne of Kordovia. Akari, Rale, and Thunderwolf emerged behind him, to the sudden onslaught of arrows and bolts being fired from above.

"It's a trick!" called Vandergrotten from above. "Kill them! A hundred gold to the man who kills that blasted orc!" Sadly for the men up on the ramparts, Galrich was currently shielded from their ranged weapons on the raising drawbridge, and thus their dreams of a sudden bonus were put on hold.

Feron resumed her half-elven form once inside the keep and attacked one of two men furiously cranking away at the chains that raised the drawbridge. He turned to face her, and apparently raising the drawbridge was a two-man job, for the second man on the other side of the drawbridge struggled to make progress in vain, for not only was the iron-bound wooden drawbridge heavy, but added to its weight was that of a fully armored half-orc barbarian loaded up with a virtual arsenal of weapons. Despite the second man's best efforts, the drawbridge slowly started lowering again.

"You cannot hope to overcome my forces," sneered Vandergrotten from above, "especially when I have allies such as this!" And as he spoke, a Gargantuan blue dragon came flapping from behind the castle, to land on the ground before the drawbridge, smack-dab in the midst of the quartet of heroes there. Akari wasted no time, striking at the dragon with Hoardmaster, but his swings were deftly dodged by the nimble-footed beast. The dragon, it turn, raised its head back and struck down at the paladin with its snapping jaws, but Akari evaded just as deftly and the dragon's teeth snapped together having caught nothing but air. Aerik, seeing his liege was safe on the drawbridge for the moment, raced over to attack the dragon, his dwarven waraxe gleaming.

Rale took the opportunity to scurry around behind the dragon, to place himself in a flanking position with Akari, but more importantly to use the massive beast's form as a shield from the arrows and bolts raining down on the heroes from the defenders up on the keep's ramparts. He tried stabbing at the beast's tail with a pair of short swords and missed - it was as if the cursed beast was always a few inches away from where it appeared to be! Thunderwolf fared no better, swinging and missing with Xanthros to the disgust of both.

After several minutes of this, during which time none of the quartet of heroes had managed to hit the dragon even once, and it inexplicably had fared no better at its attacks against them, Akari came to a humiliating conclusion: they were wasting their time on an illusion! He called to the others to ignore the dragon and raced over to the drawbridge, which was starting to slowly rise again now that Galrich's bulk was no longer on it. But then Galrich and Feron managed to slay the two men stationed at the drawbridge's cranking mechanisms and the drawbridge slammed back down, much to Vandergrotten's consternation. "Get some men down there!" he commanded. "Get that drawbridge back up! And kill that gods-be-damned orc! I'll deal with the others!"

At a mental summons from the spellcaster, a pile of dirt erupted from the ground, and out crawled a buried mechanism. As it reached its full height, the group could see that it was an iron golem juggernaut, much of the same design they had seen "piloted" by Dr. Praetorius's disembodied brain some months before. This one seemed to be fully autonomous, however, although it took commands from Vandergrotten.

Feron took a moment between killing the winch-mechanism warrior on the left and readying herself for the wave of soldiers and mercenaries spilling out of one of the low buildings inside the keep to cast a quick summoning spell, targeted outside the keep in the general direction of the iron golem juggernaut Vandergrotten had activated. A Huge earth elemental crawled up out of the ground beside the massive automaton, and the two behemoths started trading blows. It was an easy and effective way of canceling out the threat of the juggernaut, freeing the heroes to concentrate their efforts elsewhere. Aerik, Akari, Rale, and Thunderwolf raced to the now-open drawbridge and scrambled inside the keep, where Feron and Galrich were in the midst of hand-to-hand combat with a handful of soldiers who had apparently been eating in the ground-level kitchen when the keep was attacked. Worse yet, the two squat towers in the corners of the wall that held the drawbridge were apparently where the barracks were lodged, for more soldiers started racing down the stairs and trying to enter the fray from the doors leading out of the towers and into the keep's open grounds. Galrich moved through the combat and took position at one of these doors, slaying anyone who appeared, and Rale and Thunderwolf took the other, doing likewise.

Vandergrotten summoned another guardian: at his spoken command, a thick, metal chain popped up out of the depths of the moat and raised up like a snake. It continued rising, higher and higher, as its apparent base unwound from the length of the moat's circumference. By the time it had reached the back of the keep, it towered above its highest ramparts; by the time it had reached the front again its lead end seemed to topple forward onto the ground as if unable to support the weight of its entire length. As the rest of the heavy chains collapsed into a heap, however, the heap started taking on a somewhat humanoid form, and by the time the tail end of the chain had fallen into place a chain golem stood just outside the open drawbridge. It stomped its way forward.

The heroes had several reactions to the appearance of this new combatant. Rale fought even fiercer against the foes in the eastern tower, but only so he could actually enter the tower himself and do his fighting inside a room that was hopefully too small for the massive chain golem to enter. He was up against three foes at once - and more where they came from, standing on the stairway ready to attack him when their comrades in front of him fell - but felt much safer indoors fighting a nonmagical threat for once. Thunderwolf, much to Xanthros's disappointment, sheathed his sentient sword and drew his bow, shooting arrows at the chain golem, to little effect. Aerik had fought his way to his liege's side at the western tower's doorway, only to have Galrich tell him to hold off the enemies there while he attacked the chain golem with his own greatsword. Feron saw the opportunity to cause the metal construct some serious harm with a rusting grasp spell, and at Akari's urging - "I've got them!" - she left his side and turned to attack the chain golem, leaving the tiefling paladin to hold off half a dozen soldiers on his own. He probably would have been fine, had one of them not turned and opened the last of the stable's eight doors, releasing Vandergrotten's own personal mount into the fray - a half-dragon manticore, by the look of it.

"Tsukitora, I need you!" called out Akari to the heavens, and in a flash his snow-white griffon mount appeared at his side, taking a swipe at the nearest soldier and making his way instinctively towards the draconic manticore.

The chain golem, in the meantime, was holding its own. Feron had done it the most damage with her rusting grasp spell, but she just had the one of those prepared and it was fending off most of the other attacks, even those of a magical nature. It, in turn, was doing some serious damage with its pounding fists; had Feron not had a stoneskin spell protecting her, she'd have easily been smashed to a pulp. Galrich had taken a few hits from the massive golem, and only his half-orcish constitution and bullheadedness - and the deep fires of his burning rage - was keeping him in the fight.

"We've got to get to Vandergrotten!" called out Akari, leaping onto Tsukitora's back. The two had managed to fight off the soldiers on the ground level and had even slain the draconic manticore. The tiefling paladin steered his mount up into the air, attracting a virtual swarm of arrows from all sides as the defenders on the keep's ramparts all took aim at this new target. Both Akari and his mount took several hits, but the griffon flew unerringly toward the top of the eastern tower, where Vandergrotten could be seen waving his hands around in a complicated spell gesture. Akari leapt from his mount onto the battlements and charged his wizardly foe.

An armor-clad fighter stepped into Akari's way, and he took the brunt of Akari's attack instead of the wizard - who, to Akari's surprise, paid no attention at all to the fact that Akari was there to kill him; he continued his spellcasting without even acknowledging the paladin's presence. The reason for this became apparent once Akari had slain the fighter and thrust Hoardmaster's blade harmlessly through the wizard's midsection. "Another illusion!" cursed the tiefling, as other fighters up on the battlements raced to take him out.

Galrich, down below, saw that Akari was hogging all the fun, and raced over to the set of stone stairs leading up to the battlements. On his way there he casually decapitated a mercenary who had just exited the privies, having apparently been otherwise occupied by a specific biological need when the battle suddenly erupted just outside the outhouse. He raced up the steps without any regard to the chain golem still running amok below, or his dwarven bodyguard whom he had once again left behind. Aerik gave a cry of alarm and followed after his liege, leaving the western tower door unguarded. The few remaining mercenaries who had been in the western tower came gratefully spilling out, only to be faced with Thunderwolf, who had realized the futility in fighting the chain golem and had returned to wielding Xanthros against foes he could actually harm. He crossed the open grounds from the eastern tower to the western tower and gave them all a fight they'd remember - for the few seconds of life remaining to them.

When Galrich reached the top of the stairs, there were several opponents ready there to fight him off. Feron wildshaped into an eagle again and flew to the top of the battlements at the southwestern tower, resuming her form in time to deal with the rush of combatants guarding that tower's battlements. Aerik raced up the stairs in pursuit of his errant liege, leaving Thunderwolf to finish off the soldiers from the northwestern tower and Rale to finish off those few remaining soldiers from the northeastern tower. Akari battled on above the northeastern tower, drawing several other foes towards him but unable to find the elusive Vandergrotten, while his battle mount landed and tore apart those who would attack Akari from behind.

And that left nobody actively battling the chain golem. It demonstrated a surprising ability, firing off its own right hand, which untangled and slammed a fist made of chains into Feron, throwing her forward onto the battlements before it "rewound" the links and reformed its seemingly solid arm. Those mercenaries in Feron's vicinity took the opportunity to fire arrows into the downed druidess, but her stoneskin spell was still intact and it fended off most of the damage from the arrows. Then Feron cast a call lightning storm, the sky turned dark, and bolts of lightning came crashing down upon her enemies. This included the chain golem, until she realized that the power of her electrical spells were being channeled into the chain golem as healing energy, actively repairing it in the process. That's why druids tend to deal with natural enemies, she thought to herself, concentrating on striking down the human warriors before her.

Akari realized that Vandergrotten was hiding behind a greater invisibility spell when he was suddenly attacked from the air by a barrage of magic missiles which couldn't have come from anywhere else. "To me, Tsukitora!" he called, and his battle mount flapped over, allowing the tiefling to leap upon its broad back. Akari flew the griffon up into the air above the keep, scanning quickly around for any indication of his foe's location. In his determination to find the invisible wizard, he fell prey to one of the chain golem's long-reaching slam attacks, and he was pitched sideways off of his griffon's back, but his ring of feather falling kept him from falling any great distance, and Tsukitora had the presence of mind to fly back under his slowly-descending rider until Akari was once again in place on the griffon's back.

Another blast struck the paladin unerringly, and he let loose with Deathstriker, throwing the enchanted hammer at where he thought Vandergrotten would have to be to have hit him with another magic missile barrage from that angle. He heard a cry of pain that indicated he had thrown with accuracy, but by that time Galrich and Aerik had reached the top of the battlements and were fighting their way to the front of the keep, and Vandergrotten saw, lying unused in the hand of the man he had sent to fetch Galrich's corpse from what he had thought was the doppelganger assassin he had hired, the assassin's soul dagger. Still invisible, he landed on the battlements, took up the blade, and crept towards the hated half-orc who would one day be his king - if he didn't do something to prevent such a vile occurrence from happening.

Once again that day, Galrich felt the blade of a dagger piercing his back, and he instinctively whirled around and punched at his assailant. In this case, his instincts steered him right, for before he had time to notice there was nobody there his fist had pounded straight into Vandergrotten's invisible face, breaking his invisible nose and causing him to crumple into an invisible heap on the battlements. It was only when Aerik tripped over his invisible form that they realized what they had done: captured the wizard who had tried to have Galrich slain before he could ascend to the throne of Kordovia.

Aerik was assigned the task of keeping the wizard unconscious, a task he promptly devoted himself to with gusto - and the occasional kick to the invisible gut. By that time, the iron juggernaut had been destroyed by the earth elemental Feron had called, and it spent its last few moments on the material plane hammering away at the chain golem. Feron converted another of her prepared spells to calling forth another earth elemental, and together they took care of the iron construct.

That left only the clearing up of the remaining mercenaries, all of whom were up on the battlements of the keep, those who had been off-duty having already been slain as they attempted to exit the two front towers. Rale and Thunderwolf, who had attended to that duty, raced across the courtyard and up the stairs to the battlements, but by the time they had gotten there the fighting was all but over. The heroes had to give it to their opponents: they were either fiercely loyal to Lord Vandergrotten, or else realized they faced the death sentence for allying against the future King of Kordovia and figured they had nothing to lose, for they all fought to the death, to the man.

In the end, the only one remaining was Lord Targus Vandergrotten himself. He was tightly bound and gagged, while Aerik - the only one of the bunch who was from Kordovia - got his bearings and figured out exactly where they were. He announced that this was the abandoned Old Bailey Keep, apparently having had gone through some recent renovations to make it a hideout for the escaped Lord Vandergrotten. Galrich promised that when he was king, this would be renamed Battershield Keep and presented to his loyal bodyguard for his services. Aerik, for once, was speechless, not knowing what to say.

A quick search of the premises found little in the way of treasure, save for additional weapons and armor. Vandergrotten had a small chest under his bed, which yielded a couple hundred gold pieces of emergency funds and an oversized key. The key was magical in nature, and had a series of letters engraved on eight rings along its central shaft; these rings could be rotated to line up the letters in various ways, but nobody could determine its exact use, and at the moment the heroes had other things to deal with.

A trussed and badly beaten Vandergrotten was taken to the capitol city and presented to an astonished Lord Hammershard, who was pleased to see that the escaped prisoner had been recaptured. Apparently the doppelganger had been instrumental in Vandergrotten's escape, having impersonated one of the dwarven militia in charge of guarding the prisoner. He had slain another dwarf and freed Vandergrotten, then apparently gone after Galrich in an attempt to slay the future king before he could take the throne. The group could only assume that the dagger, whose gem was apparently supposed to glow once it had slain its victim and imprisoned his soul, would then be hidden away to prevent Galrich from being raised or resurrected. It made perfect sense, in a bloodthirsty way, that Vandergrotten would stoop to such measures, given that the Gods Above had already given their blessing to Kordovia being ruled by the half-orc son of their previous Queen.

Vandergrotten was taken immediately before a court of Kordovian nobility, and Lord Hammershard himself pronounced sentence, which was carried out by an eager dwarven militia member glad to double as an executioner. This met with Rale's hearty approval. "This is exactly why you always want to make sure your enemies are dead, not just captured!" he explained to Galrich with a satisfied grin.

Galrich couldn't disagree.

- - -

This was a fun adventure. Given that we generally have anywhere from a month to six weeks between gaming sessions, and after having found the abandoned tower I made for "Attempted Repossessions" to have been easy to make, I had come up with the idea to make four such towers, then the walls between, and then the buildings inside that. It took me about four sheets of cardboard from old desk calendars, but I did it. The longest time was spent drawing individual bricks onto each 1" square (I wanted it to be as easy to use as a normal geomorph), which admittedly got to be mind-numbingly dull after awhile. My original plan was to make it all detachable for easy storage, but that proved to be impractical, as the sides fit into the four towers perfectly fine but the top section didn't stay in place as well as I had hoped, and it needed to be glued down. But I kept all of the interior buildings detachable, to I could use the outer keep "shell" as other small castles in the future, replacing the interior buildings (the stables, kitchen building, middens, and well) to make a slightly different configuration.

Logan, of course, saw that I was making a scale-model castle in my man-cave, so I did like I always did: I swore him to secrecy. When the time came to go through this adventure, I left the castle in a large bag in the back of my van, along with the strips of "moat" I had cut to size from blue poster board. When the PCs teleported to the keep, I unrolled the full sheet of calendar paper on which I had drawn the outline of the keep, and made a big deal about having left my moat in the van. So I slipped outside quickly, grabbed up the castle and the moat, and left the castle at the top of the stairs out of view from the kitchen, and placed the moat around the geomorph map. Then, as the PCs made their plans, I snuck back to the stairs, grabbed up the castle, and plunked it into place on top of the calendar map, much to their amazement.

We had a blast fighting all of those forces at once, and I think I'll have to come up with a way to use that castle again sometime in the future.

Oh, and at the beginning, when Galrich was fighting the invisible doppelganger, Jacob asked if he could have his raging barbarian pick up a desk and throw it across the room, figuring it would almost have to hit the assassin, given the relative sizes of the desk (large) and the room (small). I initially applied the standard -4 to hit for an improvised weapon, but then decided that it would be pretty hard for him to miss, so I just spur-of-the-moment ruled that he'd hit with anything but a natural "1." Jacob then proceeded to roll exactly that, leading to Galrich's uncharacteristic pratfall and gusts of laughter from all of the rest of us.

ADVENTURE 64 - THE LOCKPICK DUNGEONS

PC Roster:
NPC Roster:
"Let me see that thing," commanded Feron. Rale, tired of playing with the foolish item and having gotten nowhere with it, handed it over without a fuss.

Feron turned the oversized key around, studying the way the letters lined up on the wheels that circled the shaft. There were eight such wheels, each containing five letters in the Common alphabet. Obviously, it was some sort of elaborate word puzzle, and Feron usually excelled at those. Part of the problem, she decided, was that she couldn't see all of the letters at once. Getting out a sheet of parchment, she carefully inscribed each of the letters from each wheel. Looking over her work, she saw the following:

E T N K E H N S
. O L G P I E T
L U E E Y O C E
D E O R T O N .
T V C . P O R K

Click to expand...

"Look at the three blank spaces," Feron said. "Those must be word breaks. So we have a series of words, up to eight letters long, with some blanks filling in where more than one word shows up on the same line."

"Try 'COMMAND WORD,'" suggested Akari. "These things always start out with 'COMMAND WORD.'"

"Hmm," mused Feron. "There's no 'C' in either of the first two columns. It's not 'COMMAND WORD.'"

Galrich peeked over Feron's shoulder as she puzzled over the letters. "Hey, that spells 'PIE,'" he pointed out, proud of his newly-learned ability to read and write. "And that there says, 'PORK.'"

"It's all got to say something," Feron said. She shuffled a couple of the wheels around, then looked back at her parchment. "I think the easiest way to figure this out is to concentrate on those blanks. Look at this one," she said, pointing to the blank in the fourth column. "That means the word in front of the blank can only have three letters. So what do we have? 'EVE?' 'DOE?' 'TOE?' 'DUO?' 'DUE?'" she mused aloud, scribbling the possibilities in the margins of her parchment.

"How about 'TO?'" asked Rale.

"Yeah, 'TOO' fits," affirmed Feron, adding it to her list of three-letter words.

"No, with only one 'O,'" replied Rale, taking the key back from her and reconfiguring the wheels. "Blank, T, O, blank." The key now read:

. T O . E H N S
L O C K P I E T
D U N G Y O C E
T E L E T O N .
E V E R P O R K

Click to expand...

"Hey, that second line could be 'LOCKPICK,'" said Rale, flipping the wheels into position. For his trouble, he got:

. T O . E H E .
L O C K P I C K
D U N G Y O N S
T E L E T O R T
E V E R P O N E

Click to expand...

"That doesn't make any sense," Rale complained to himself.

"There are two 'Ps' on that fifth wheel," pointed out Akari, flipping the other 'P' into place, and reading what was thus formed. 'TO THE LOCKPICK DUNGEONS TELEPORT EVERYONE.' Oh, wait, start here: 'TELEPORT EVERYONE TO THE LOCKPICK DUNGEONS.'"

The command phrase haven been spoken aloud, the key did just that: it teleported everyone to the Lockpick Dungeons.

The six heroes suddenly found themselves in a room filled with inky darkness. "Sonuva--" sputtered Rale. "Way to go, Akari! How about next time, we don't activate the command word until we're all ready to go?"

"Uh, sorry about that," replied Akari sheepishly, as he opened up his haversack and started breaking out sun rods and passing them around.

The group was in a large, rectangular room with six closed stone doors. Each of the doors had two lines of letters carved on them, as follows:

I......II.....III....IV.....V......VI
QDIN...OCFN...LIZM...JQZE...YQLM...PWKY

Click to expand...

In the center of the room were two concentric circular slabs of stone, each about a foot thick, pierced in their centers by a thick upright column of stone. All along the edges of the stone circles, evenly spaced, were the 26 letters of the Common alphabet, only the bottom circle had the alphabet running clockwise, and the smaller circle above it had the alphabet going counter-clockwise.

Rale began by examining each of the stone doors. Since there were no knobs, handles, or hinges in sight, he surmised that these were the type of door that had a central column at top and bottom, which allowed the door to pivot when pushed on either side. He started with the first door, and pushed on both sides in turn, but it didn't budge. It did have a keyhole, though, and while the keyhole didn't go all the way through to the other side of the door to let him peek through, it did allow a means by which the door might be opened. Rale unpacked his lockpicks and went to work, noticing as he did so that there was an odd lilac perfume emanating from the door.

Feron looked at the letter wheels in the middle of the chamber and at the letters engraved on the doors. While Rale worked at opening the first door, she wandered over to the second and tried pushing it open on the right side. That turned out to be a bad idea, as it blasted her with a beam of frigid energy as soon as she had touched it. She backed off, and scraped a layer of frost from her armor, face, and hands, shivering all the while.

"Why don't you let me handle the doors?" asked Rale, looking up from his efforts at the first door.

Feron just glared at the rogue and wandered back over to the twin circles. "I'll bet it's a combination lock of sorts," she said, looking at the letters on the third door. "'L, I, Z, M,'" she read, twisting the top stone circle so that the "A" inscribed on the bottom circle lined up with each of the four letters in turn. "That should do it," she announced, and then strode up purposefully to the third door. But then, after a moment's hesitation, she decided she didn't trust her solution enough to want to be the one to test out her theory; Akari gallantly stepped up in her place and gave the side of the stone door a shove. It didn't budge - but it did send a blast of fire that covered him from head to toe. With a cry of surprise, he backed away, glad to note that as a tiefling he was able to shrug off a small bit of the fire's effects.

"I guess that's not the secret," winced Feron, and checked to see that Akari was okay.

"Got it!" announced Rale, stepping back from the first door, putting his lockpicks away, and then pushing up against the right side. The door was heavy, but it swiveled on its central axis with a grinding sound. Unfortunately, it led only to a short stone corridor, at the end of which was another door.

"I'll check it out," offered Galrich, but Rale held him back with a raised hand. "Let me examine it first," he recommended, and the half-orc stepped back, waiting impatiently as Rale gave the whole area a quick inspection.

"I think it's trapped," he announced after about half a minute, during which he did nothing but swing his sun rod in various directions. "Let's try a different door."

"What makes you say that?" demanded Galrich. "I don't see any traps."

"Look closely at the floor," replied Rale. "You can see a crack going the whole length of the floor, all the way to the opposite door. I'd bet anything that the floor hinges open, and drops us into a pit below or something."

"It smells nice, though," pointed out Feron, who had wandered open to see what Rale had found. "Lilacs."

"Yeah, no idea about that," admitted Rale. "Which door should we try next?"

"There's got to be a reason for those letters on the doors," said Feron. She turned to Rale and asked, "Is there such a thing as a combination lock for a door like these?"

"Sure, it's possible," said Rale. "Pick a door, and we'll give it a try."

Feron opted for the sixth door, and painstaking lined up the stone dials so the "A" on the bottom wheel lined up with the "P," "W," "K," and "Y" in turn. "That should do it..." she said, with a glimmer of doubt in her voice.

Galrich, bored by now, offered to push it open, but it wouldn't budge. However, it didn't zap him either, which Feron chose to take as a good sign. Rale applied himself to the task of picking the lock through the keyhole, while the others stood around him holding up their sun rods to give him proper illumination by which to work his magic. Feron was back to examining the stone circles, sure she was missing something.

Rale successfully opened the lock on the sixth door, and stood back as Galrich pushed it open. Just like the first door, this one led to a short corridor with another door at the far end; this time, Galrich anticipated Rale's warning and stepped back after having opened the door, so that Rale could check it out first. Aerik nodded in appreciation of his liege's uncommon sensibility, for once.

Rale checked the floor, the intersections between the floor and walls and between the walls and ceiling, and professed them to be safe enough to enter. He stepped into the short corridor, checking his surroundings before advancing, and finally approached the far door. "Another trap," he announced. "There's a rune hidden here at the top of the door; looks like it's triggered to go off as soon as anybody touches this door."

"Then I vote we don't touch this door," piped up Akari. The others agreed - and then spun frantically in place at the sound of Feron's shriek, then raced back into the central chamber to find out what fate had befallen the druid.

But Feron was fine - in fact, she was grinning from ear to ear. "We've been concentrating on the wrong letters!" she announced happily. "Look at the top rows on all of the doors: they only have two letters, 'I' and 'V.' Watch what happens when I line the 'I' on top with the 'I' on the bottom: the 'V' on top lines up with the 'V' on the bottom!"

"So?" Rale demanded.

"So read me those letters on that door you just opened," she commanded. As Rale did so, she called out the corresponding letters on the other letter wheel now that they were lined up properly. "'B-U-G-S' - bugs! I'll bet the trap summons a swarm of bugs of some type!" Using the same technique, Feron discovered that the first door was marked with "ACID" in code, which no doubt explained the scent of lilacs: a permanent olfactory illusion to cover the stringent scent of the pool of acid waiting just below the floor trap. Doors two and three were coded for "COLD" and "FIRE" respectively, which made sense, as Feron and Akari had discovered on their own. The fourth door was marked "HARM" and the fifth "SAFE," so Door Five it was.

It was locked, but it didn't hold up to Rale's lockpicking abilities any better than Doors One and Six had, and before too long the group was through the door and heading down a flight of stairs that bent to the right and opened into another large chamber. This one had two passageways flanked by pillars, with a carved message of some type between the doors. Rale led the way, checking for traps, and read the engraved message.

Those who wish to plunder the treasure vaults ahead should take the passageway to the right.
Those who no longer wish to wander these dungeons are free to use the passageway to the left.

Click to expand...

Looking down the corridors without actually entering them, Rale saw each was another short passageway with a door at the end. He had already learned that that particular configuration was not necessarily to be trusted, here in the Lockpick Dungeons, and gave a close scrutiny to each. After he had determined that the floor of the corridor on the left didn't look to be attached to the walls of that corridor, Akari called out from behind him that he'd found a secret door. It was on the wall to the side of the stairs by which the group had entered. Not trusting the obvious exits from the room, Rale decided to give the secret passageway a try. He led the way, checking for traps every couple of feet, to the obvious exasperation of Galrich, who just wanted to get on with it!

The secret passage curved around and opened into another room, judging from the door placement the room on the other side of the two short corridors. However, there was a door to the north which corresponded with the door of the leftmost corridor, whereas the short corridor to the right apparently ended up at a false door, for there was no corresponding door in this room. There was another door to the south, this one much larger than the others. Akari and Rale stepped up to examine it. It, too, had letters engraved upon it. They read:

C O M D A
R O W M N
D H O N P
E T T O E
D R O M I
D O O R S

Click to expand...

"Great, another word puzzle," complained Rale. "Whoever built this place was obviously a puzzle junkie."

The group crowded around the letters, and Akari was the first to point out that the letters for the words "COMMAND WORD" - well, all except for the final "D" - could be found in the top two rows. After a moment's scrutiny, he saw that the two-word phrase could be figured out by bumping up and down along the top two rows, then bouncing back the way he'd come, dropping down to the next two rows, and completing the process. "'COMMAND WORD TO OPEN THE DOOR IS MORD," he read aloud.

Immediately upon saying the word "Mord," the large door raised up into the wall, revealing a small room inside. Rale gave it a quick perusal while standing outside the now-open door, and announced that he didn't see anything overtly traplike. He and Akari stepped into the small room to give it a more thorough inspection. After about a half-minute, the door suddenly swung closed again, trapping the two inside. Before they had an opportunity to do anything, the entire room plummeted down a corkscrewed shaft, spinning counterclockwise as it did so. At the end of the twisted shaft, the door opened, the whole room tipped forward, and the two adventurers were pitched unceremoniously into the room just beyond. As they spilled into a heap, they could hear the door closing behind them and the elevator room rising back up to the upper level.

On that upper level, Feron and the others were trying to find a way to open the now-shut door, as the command word was no longer working. As they pounded fruitlessly on the door, there was a sudden grinding noise behind them, and they turned to see a young elven woman in leather armor, wearing a short sword belted at her hip, emerging from another secret passageway across the room from them. "Oh!" she exclaimed in surprise. "Hello! My name is Jhazmina. I assume you guys got here the same way I did?" And with that, she held up an identical copy of the magical key that Akari had been holding when the whole group got teleported to the Lockpick Dungeons. Feron immediately distrusted this sudden newcomer; perhaps she'd been hanging around Rale too long? "Keep your distance," she warned, her hand on the hilt of her scimitar. "Just where did you come from?" she demanded.

"A small town called Riverton," Jhazmina replied. "I found this key in a chest filled with--oh, you mean right now!" She nodded to the secret passage in the stone wall behind her. "There's a secret door back here. It leads to a small pile of armor and weapons, none of the type that I can use, but there's a suit of armor that might fit the dwarf. C'mon, I'll show you!" And with that, she turned back to the crack in the wall and opened it further, revealing another pivoting door.

"Hold," commanded Galrich to his dwarven bodyguard, oblivious to the fact that Aerik hadn't budged an inch from where he was standing. In fact, Aerik had his dwarven greataxe at the ready, in case this elven lass had treachery in her heart.

"Goodness, you're a twitchy bunch," Jhazmina observed, after noticing that nobody was moving to follow her to the treasure she had unearthed. "Okay, suit yourselves. I couldn't tell if any of the stuff was magical, but it did look to be in pretty good condition." Thunderwolf, a bit embarrassed about how the group was treating this pretty young elf, stepped up and introduced himself, but was then pulled back by Feron. "Keep your distance," commanded Feron. "We don't know anything about her."

Meanwhile, down below, Rale and Akari picked themselves up from the floor and looked around at their new surroundings. They were in a smallish room, with a floor covered in alternating squares of white and black, like a chessboard. There was a mist rising up from the floor, quickly covering the lower half of the room, making it difficult to see - but before the obscuring mist effect fully took hold, they saw a closed door across the room and a disturbingly familiar shadowy object floating around the far corner of the room. It bobbed and turned to face them, eyestalks twisting to point in their direction as it did so.

"Down!" shouted Rale as he dove to the ground, hiding in the mist. Akari, in his full plate armor, wasn't as quick to make it prone, but managed to do so just as a beam of energy flashed over his head. "Beholder!" he yelled, as Rale crouched behind the armor-clad paladin for protection.

"Let's split up," suggested Rale in a whisper. "We'll take him from both sides."

"Bad idea," argued Akari, just as quietly. "If we stick together, it should only have three eyestalks capable of aiming at us at any one time. If we split up, we each get three pointed at us." As if to help make his point, another beam blasted directly over their heads.

"Okay, fine," hissed Rale. "You go first, I'll be right behind you." Akari looked back at his companion, unsure if the rogue actually meant it or was simply trying to get the paladin to go do all of the fighting. Either way, he turned back in the direction of the beholder and started creeping up to it, as quietly as he could. Then, when it was once again in his sight, he sprang up and swung Hoardmaster into it with all of his might. Surprisingly, his single swing cut the floating beast in twain, and it exploded into his face in an eruption of spores. Too late, Akari realized he had not been in valiant combat with a beholder, but rather with a gas spore - and the obscuring mist and illusions of flashing beams of energy had only reinforced the charade. Fortunately, Akari's tiefling constitution was able to shrug off the effects of the spores, and after a brief fit of coughing he was ready to move on. Rale moved on with him now that the danger was over, and together they found their way over to door across the way. It was locked, and Rale started in on it with his lockpicks.

"Shouldn't we go back for the others?" asked Akari.

"They saw what happened to us," responded Rale. "I imagine they should be right behind us."

By then, the elevator room had risen back up to the upper level and Feron discovered that repeating the command word "Mord" was working once again - apparently it was a fail-safe, to prevent one from opening the door to an empty shaft. "Door's open, guys!" she said, looking over her shoulder at the empty room behind her, and the wide-open secret door that Jhazmina had used.

"Idiots!" she hissed between her teeth as she poked her head through the secret door, which turned a corner and led to a short set of stairs. Sure enough, Jhazmina was down at the bottom, about to turn the corner to the right, with Thunderwolf behind her and Galrich and Aerik behind him. At least Aerik had the good sense to be shaking his head, as if he was sure this wasn't a good idea.

He was right. Jhazmina popped back around the corner and aimed a wand at the group conveniently bunched up in a straight line along the narrow steps. Feron was quick enough to anticipate what was coming and dodged back around the corner up at the top of the stairs, and thus avoided the lightning bolt Jhazmina sent flying up the stairwell. Cries of pain from her comrades illicited nothing more than a quick thought of It serves you idiots right! from an angered Feron.

Thunderwolf, the first in line on the stairs, swung Xanthros at the nimble elf, but she dodged below his swing and crossed over to the left side of the cross-corridor at the bottom of the stairs, kicking open a barricade from a hidden door and swinging down through it in a single move. Thunderwolf and the others raced after her, pulling the door open and poking their heads in - and then pulled them right back out again and slammed the door back shut.

"What's back there?" called down Feron from the top of the stairs.

"Gelatinous cube," replied Galrich.

"Did it get her?"

"No such luck," replied the half-orc. "She scampered up the wall on the other side. She must have been wearing boots like you've got." Here he was referring to Feron's boots of spider climbing, which had been put to good use on many an adventure. Feron tried visualizing the layout of the Lockpick Dungeons as she understood them, and realized that the gelatinous cube would almost certainly have been directly underneath the leftmost corridor from the room which offered two different hallways to traverse - both of them apparently trapped. "So have you had enough fun down there, ignoring my suggestions not to trust strangers you meet in a dungeon?"

"Yes, Feron," replied Thunderwolf sheepishly, and began trudging back up the stairs. Aerik took a moment to check out the small pile of treasure that Jhazmina had referred to to lure them all down there, and sure enough, there was a small pile of weapons and armor down there, even including a suit of dwarven half-plate and a dwarven battleaxe. Aerik passed on the armor, preferring his own, but he picked up the battleaxe as a backup weapon, and some further poking around discovered a magical dagger and a few potions, which were distributed among the group.

Eventually, though, Feron managed to herd the group into the elevator room, which had been waiting patiently for them. They stood inside the room waiting for something to happen, and after about 30 seconds the room plunged down the corkscrewing shaft as it had before, dumping them into a heap into a room filled with mist as it had earlier done to Akari and Rale. However, they could hear sounds of battle coming from the far side of the room, so they got to their feet and headed in that direction.

In the other room, Rale had managed to open the lock and enter the room and he found it remarkably like the room he and Akari had just left: same size, same black and while tiles on the floor, same beholder levitating in the far corner of the room. In fact, the only differences seemed to be that there were two additional doors leading out of this room, the tiles didn't seem to activate any illusion spells, and the beholder was very much a beholder, angered at the intrusion. It blasted the two with eye rays when it wasn't covering them within the cone of its anti-magic ray from its central eye.

Akari and Rale had been holding their own against the monstrosity - Rale from the safety of the doorway of the door he had picked to enter the beholder's room, ducking back into the doorway long enough to pepper the beholder with arrows before ducking back out of sight - and the addition of the other four heroes spelled doom for the levitating sphere of many eyes. Despite hitting a few of the heroes with various eye rays, it didn't manage to get them with the really important ones, which could disintegrate them at once or petrify them into a statue, before they had cut it down with spells and weapons of their own. Thunderwolf in particular was excited to have finally come up against such a monster of legend, while Rale reclaimed his fired arrows, placed them back into his quiver, and attacked the nearest of the locked doors with his thieves' tools.

Two of the locked doors were false doors, meant to simply waste time in the midst of battle with the beholder, but merely a source of irritation now that the beast had been slain. The third door's locking mechanism finally gave up under Rale's concentrated efforts, and the group found a short hallway just beyond, lined with glowing weapons, and a closed door at the far end. The weapons included a heavy mace, a longsword, a greatsword, a dagger, a short sword, a whip, a greataxe, and a light crossbow.

"Careful," advised Rale. "I wouldn't touch any of them."

"I would!" enthused Thunderwolf, grabbing up the nearest weapon, the short sword.

"Dibs on the greatsword!" called out Galrich at the same time, grabbing it up. Then, for good measure, he grabbed up the greataxe as well, offering it to Aerik. "Want it?" he asked.

"No thanks, My Lord," replied the dwarf, looking at it closely without actually touching it. "This smells too much like a trap."

"Nonsense," replied Galrich, as he and Thunderwolf grabbed up all of the weapons they could, ending up with four apiece and chuckling at the superstitiousness of their companions, up until the point that Thunderwolf tried putting them away in his pack. "Uh oh," he said with a worried tone in his voice.

"Problem?" asked Rale with just a hint of I-told-you-so in his voice.

"I, uh, can't seem to put this short sword down," the fighter admitted, trying to drop the weapon from his grip and failing.

"Let me see it," commanded Rale, and looked at the blade in Thunderwolf's hand. Again, avoiding touching the thing himself, he examined it closely, and asked, "You mean this jet-black blade with the symbol of Nerull, God of Death, carved into the hilt?"

"Why can't I drop it?" demanded Thunderwolf in a near panic.

"It's cursed, no doubt," replied Rale, the I-told-you-so in his voice now more than just a hint. "We can probably get Cal to try to break the curse when we get back, but for now you're stuck with it." He turned to Galrich. "Are any of the weapons you picked up preventing you from putting them down?" he asked.

"Nope," replied Galrich proudly. "Other than the mace telling me to kill all of you and bathe it in your blood, I haven't noticed anything at all unusual with any of my batch."

"Galrich!" chided Feron, hastily stepping away from him.

"It's okay," assured Galrich, "I put them all in my pack, and I'll let Cal sort through them before I actually use any of them, promise."

Not entirely reassured, Rale led the way to the far door, surprised to find it unlocked. Beyond was a large pool of dark water, flanked by a narrow walkway around it covered in tiles of glowing letters. There were words carved into the door at the far end of the room, but they couldn't make out what they said.

"I'll see what's up," Feron offered, climbing up onto the wall with her boots of spider climbing without touching any of the tiles on the floor. She climbed higher, and from her vantage point could see all of the letters around the pool. They were laid out as such:

N O P A R E P A

E . . . . . . T

R . . . . . . K

K . . . . . . A

S . . . . . . H

I . . . . . . D

N . . . . . . I

E . . . . . . F

A . . . . . . N

O . . . . . . M

S O N D O T U M

Click to expand...

"Not another bloody word puzzle," groaned Galrich. "I hate this place!"

"This shouldn't be too difficult," reasoned Feron. "I imagine you need to step on the correct letters in sequence. The door is there between the 'D' and 'O,' so whatever you're supposed to spell out has to start with one of those letters." She looked to see if one "path" to the far door spelled out anything, with no luck.

"Go see what the door says," commanded Rale. "Maybe there's a clue there or something. And nobody step into the room until I say so!" he said sternly to Thunderwolf, who at least had the good grace to look sheepish. He tried for the umpteenth time to rid himself of the short sword, with no further luck.

"The door says, 'Is this correct, or do you wish to remain behind?'" Feron called back from the far side of the room. "But wait, above the door, there are some lines!" she called excitedly. "I'll bet they light up when you step on a letter!" She described them to Rale, who hurriedly jotted them down on a scrap of paper per Feron's instructions. He was left with the following:

_____ _____ ..... _____ _____ _____ ..... _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ ..... _____

_____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ ..... _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____

_____ _____ ..... _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____

Click to expand...

"So the first word should be two letters," reasoned Feron. "'DO.' Who's going to be our test subject?"

"I will," said Thunderwolf dejectedly. He knew he had screwed up by picking up the cursed short sword and wanted to make amends. At Feron's order, he stepped onto the tile with a "D," and upon doing so the glow went out of the letter on the tile at his feet, while at the same time a "D" appeared over the far door. "Now step onto the "'O'," commanded Feron, and Thunderwolf complied, with the same results. Although it involved a lot of walking back and forth between the two sides of the pool - which Feron eventually prevented by sending Thunderwolf down one side and Rale down the other, each stepping forward upon her command - eventually the phrase, "DO NOT SUMMON A FIENDISH KRAKEN TO APPEAR" was spelled out in glowing letters over the door.

"Yeah, good plan, let's not do that," agreed Rale, thinking back to the time he had been slain by a kraken and shuddering at the thought. "So what's with the phrase on the door?"

Feron examined it for a minute, before breaking out into a smile. "It's asking, 'left or right?'" she said triumphantly. "It's correct - we don't want to summon a fiendish kraken - so turn the handle to the right." Rale did so, and the door opened without incident. "I hate this place," he grumbled as they advanced to the next room.

There was a short corridor leading to a slightly larger room. Rale insisted on checking the corridor first before allowing anyone to proceed, and discovered a tripwire leading into the walls on either side. Testing a theory, he stuck his hand through one illusory wall, then popped his head in as well for a quick peek. "Mounted crossbow, waiting to shoot the first fool to trip on the wire here. There's probably another on on the other side." He had everybody step carefully over the wire, then did so himself and repositioned himself at the lead once again.

The room beyond was octagonal in shape, with a door off to the side and one longer side of the octagon opening into the corridor leading to the room. Rale didn't see any traps on the door, nor could he detect any magical runes waiting to activate any hidden spells, so he tried the door's knob and found it to be locked. That wasn't all, though: the entire door was a trap, which did several things in sequence once activated by touch. First, a 10-foot section of wall from the left side of the corridor behind them swung over and closed off the octagonal room and half the corridor, just beyond where the hidden crossbows still waited to shoot their bolts. Immediately after it closed and locked in place, a similar section from the right side of the corridor swung over and sealed the heroes into the octagonal section of the room. And then the eight walls of the octagonal room started slowly lowering into the floor.

A horrid stench of death wafted over the lowering walls; this and a low, moaning coming from dozens of disparate voices all around them led Feron to guess just what was waiting for them. And she was right yet again, for the lowering walls revealed an even larger octagonal room surrounding the smaller one the heroes were standing in, and filling just about every space between the two rooms were dozens of shambling zombies. The staggering undead reached out at the heroes over the separating wall that was waist high, then knee high, then sunken down to the level of the floor. The hungry zombies closed in on the heroes from all sides, Feron letting out a shriek of horror as they did so.

Akari reacted first, blasting a wide swath of the undead with the power of his raised holy symbol. Fortunately, while they were greatly outnumbered by the zombie horde, they moved no quicker than the zombies the group had encountered throughout their adventuring career, nor were they much tougher; Akari's positive energy blast disintegrated close to a dozen all at once. Galrich and Aerik flanked Feron, shielding her with their bodies as they hacked away at the zombies with greatsword and dwarven waraxe. Thunderwolf was forced to use the short sword of Nerull that refused to leave his hand, and found it was actively working against him, lessening the strength of his blows. Rale swore as he went into battle with his two short swords, hacking away and cursing the zombies' lack of critical points to strike for extra damage. Feron stayed in the center of the room and called down lightning strikes upon the zombies, trying her best not to touch, or be touched, by any of the foul undead. It took awhile, but eventually they destroyed the shambling corpses, leaving Akari and Rale to search the walls for a secret way out of the room, which they eventually discovered.

This led to a wide room with five vault doors, each holding a dual-alphabet set of dials like they had found (on a much larger scale) in the very first room they had encountered in the Lockpick Dungeons. There were letters carved in the spaces between the doors, spelling out the words "CHOOSE" and "WISELY" just below it, with the caption "FOR ONLY ONE DOOR BEFORE YOU OPENS TRUE" carved on the floor just in front of the doors. There was a large keyhole just below each set of dials on the door, which looked the right size to accommodate the key that had teleported them here.

"Another puzzle," groaned Rale, peeking through a keyhole at random and confirming that he couldn't see all the way through into the next room.

Feron went to the first door and started fiddling with the dials. Rale put the key into the keyhole, but it wouldn't unlock. He tried this with each of the five doors, with the same results.

"You probably have to line up the dials correctly," suggested Feron, spinning the dials so the "C" on the outer dial matched up with the "H" on the first door, since those were the top two letters flanking that door. "Try it now," she said.

Rale inserted the key into the keyhole, turned it, and the door opened up into a small room, the back wall of which was lined with serrated daggers, each with a glowing gem at the end of the pommel. "Nicely done!" said Rale, standing in the open doorway and looking at everything.

"What are you waiting for?" asked Galrich, trying to brush past the rogue and grab up the daggers.

"Not so fast!" snarled Rale. "Haven't you learned your lesson yet? Tell you what - give me a coin and you can pass."

"A coin? What for? I'm not paying you anything!"

"Just trust me," Rale responded. "You can have it right back." Galrich sneered, sure that there was some trick involved, but before he could reach for his coin purse Aerik had handed one over from his own - a copper piece, Rale noted with a smirk. Nonetheless, he took it from the dwarven bodyguard and flipped it into the room - where it promptly sunk through the floor and made a slightly squishy sound doing so.

"It's an illusion," replied Rale. He asked for his nine-and-a-half-foot pole, which Akari had stashed in his haversack for him, and poked it through the floor. Pulling it back out, he showed it to the others; it was covered in green slime.

"And that would have been you," Rale replied, the I-told-you-so in his voice having apparently decided to make itself comfortable and stay awhile. "I'll bet this whole room is an illusion." He poked at the glowing daggers with the slimy end of the nine-and-a-half-foot pole, upending a couple of them and dropping them into the green slime pit in the process. "Or maybe not," he amended.

Feron summoned an owl and had it grab up a dagger for them to inspect. It turned out to be a cheap copy made of tin, with a glass gem on the pommel, no doubt enhanced by a Nystul's magic aura spell. "Ruse," she announced. Still, she was pleased to have figured out how to open the doors, and was eager to open the others. She went to the second door, when Rale interrupted her.

"Let's try this one next," he suggested, walking over to the farthest door.

"Why that one?" Feron wanted to know.

"Because it's the last one most people would try, if they went in sequence," reasoned Rale. He didn't know it, but he was absolutely right, but for the wrong reason; applying the same trick Feron had discovered, by lining up the top letters on either side of each door and then translating the bottom two letters, the fifth door was the only one which gave the same letters when "translated." Regardless, the door opened after Feron had moved the dials into the correct configuration and Rale inserted the key. It led to a larger vault, also containing assassin's life-drinking daggers - only these seemed to be the real thing. Rale and Akari entered the vault to snatch them all up and stuff them into the paladin's haversack.

Then a familiar voice echoed across the room. "I'll take those," said Jhazmina, firing a crossbow at Thunderwolf, who was standing in the doorway to the vault. Feron dropped a lightning bolt on her from a call lightning spell as she stepped fully into the room from the same passageway they had used. Then the fourth vault door opened, and another elven woman entered the fray. She was attired the same way as Jhazmina, but also wielded an odd-looking rod that had a mummified hand at one end. Raising the rod, she vanished from view.

Jhazmina's form seemed to shimmer for just a moment, and then she raised her hand and caused a web to form across the fifth doorway, trapping Rale and Akari inside. However, it didn't long stand up against Hoardmaster, which cut through it almost effortlessly. In the meantime, Galrich and Aerik moved in to attack Jhazmina, while Thunderwolf was aggressively attacking the space in front of him with his cursed sword, trying to hit the invisible woman he knew had to be there somewhere. However, the newcomer, Aurielle, had leapt up to the ceiling immediately upon turning invisible and was crawling along its length to line up a sneak attack. She dropped from the ceiling behind Thunderwolf, shifting form and sinking her teeth into the flesh of his neck, injecting him with her venom.

Feron wasn't sure what to make of this, for the woman still seemed to be a female elf, albeit apparently now one with needlelike fangs. Still, the druidess decided to wildshape into one of the newer forms that her training had made available to her, and her body immediately burst into flame as she became a fire elemental. This shocked Aurielle, who leapt back up to the ceiling and started walking - on all fours - across its length, back through the fourth vault door, which led to a short stairwell leading down. Feron followed, and Aurielle realized that trying to attack a fire elemental with a poisonous bite attack was a poor tactic at best. She tried keeping her distance, while Feron swatted at her with a flaming fist.

Jhazmina wasn't faring too well against Galrich and Aerik, and did even worse when Rale and Akari approached with weapons drawn. She instinctively shifted, and the young aranea took on her spider form, skittering up a wall to the relative safety of the ceiling, where she was out of range of the heroes' melee weapons. Rale simply took the opportunity to use his shortbow, and sent several shafts burying themselves deep into her abdomen. Jhazmina leaped down at the nearest foe, hoping to pump Galrich full of venom before he had a chance to react, but he practically cut her in two with his greatsword before she had made it all the way down to the floor level. The aranea curled up and died on the spot.

Aurielle followed her aranea sister in death a scant few moments later, burned to death by Feron's fiery form. The stairs they had fought upon took a turn to the right and went even deeper into a living quarters for the two slain araneas. A calendar showed that several araneas took turns on guard duty at the Lockpick Dungeons, but whether they had built the place or were just running it was still not clear. There was little in the way of treasure, just a pair of ioun stones that prevented the users from needing to eat, which explained why there were no kitchens or bathroom facilities in the complex to be seen. The group grabbed them up, and Rale claimed the mummy-hand rod, which turned out to be particularly useful for a rogue, for it allowed the wielder to use a total of five spells each day, split up in any combination between dispel magic, identify, invisibility, knock, and mage hand. It could also wear a ring, allowing the wielder to gain the benefits of up to three rings (assuming he wore two rings himself).

And thus, another of Pinwhistle's prophecies had come true, for the warforged had told Rale: "The woman who will one day give you her hand will be dead before you place your ring upon it."

"Let's get out of here," suggested Rale.

"How?" asked Akari. "Thunderwolf doesn't have a Guild ring yet, so he can't bink back."

In the end, Feron binked back, allowing Delphyne to take her place in the Lockpick Dungeons. She had a greater teleport prepared, so she was able to bring the others with her back to Guild Headquarters. In the days that followed, they discovered that several of the souls imprisoned in the assassin's life-drinker daggers were prominent merchants from Greyhawk City, another was - like Galrich - inconveniently in line for a throne that someone else wanted for himself, and several others were just unlucky enough to be hated enough by people with enough money to stage their (semi-permanent, as it turned out) deaths. The heroes turned all of the daggers over to the Guild, and allowed them to sort out finding which souls were imprisoned in which gems, and who to contact about the fact.

- - -

I wrote this adventure for several reasons: I had long wanted to write a trap-based adventure to give Rale an opportunity to shine; I also wanted to throw some more puzzles at my players; but more importantly, I needed a way to get Galrich back in the game if the doppelganger assassin actually succeeded in slaying the half-orc and imprisoning his soul in the gem of an assassin's life-drinking dagger at the beginning of "Preemptive Regicide." I actually built a life-sized key, complete with the sliding bands of letters, for the players to monkey around with. Sadly, I used white poster board, so it's not the sturdiest of constructions, but it served its purpose.

ADVENTURE 65 - THE MAGMA MAGE

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NPC Roster:
The heroes walked out of the castle in the capitol city of Kordovia, having briefed Lord Hammershard on the results of their expedition to the Lockpick Dungeons. (They left out the part where they had traveled there accidentally.) Now that Lord Vandergrotten, his doppelganger assassin, and his hired band of cutthroats and mercenaries had been dealt with, it was hoped that Galrich's eventual ascension to the throne of Kordovia would go smoothly, when the time came.

The group discussed among themselves whether they wanted to head back to Greyhawk City - Delphyne had a greater teleport spell ready - or spend the rest of the day in Kordovia as long as they were there. Infernia was out of her tinder box, enjoying the sunshine and a conversation with her master about his new robe of the archmagi, upon which he had splurged recently after having finally attained the title of "Archmage" after years of arcane study. It had cost him nearly every piece of gold he had - and that only after having eventually found a buyer for his portion of the wand of infinity (which Telgrane disparaging referred to as his "sparkly wand," for its powers were severely diminished in sunlight). The group now knew that Daestas the baelnorn was actively trying to prevent them from combining all three pieces of the wand of infinity, and Telgrane figured selling his piece would not only bring him a fair bit of coin, but also hopefully get the good-intentioned undead off of the group's collective backs.

"You look very handsome in your new robes, Master."

"Well, thank you, Infernia. I just hope the combat benefits prove to be worth the expenditure."

"Just how poor are you, now, Telgrane?" asked Thunderwolf.

"Well, let's just say if I converted all of my spare cash into gold coins, I could carry all of it inside a single glove. I wouldn't be against delving into some treasure-laden dungeon right about now."

"Whoa!" yelped Infernia in sudden surprise. Telgrane looked down at his familiar, who had been walking next to him. "What's the matter?" he asked, concern in his voice.

"I don't know, Master, I just-- There! It happened again! Did you see?"

Telgrane had indeed. His fire elemental familiar, in an effort to fit in, habitually assumed the form of what she considered to be an attractive humanoid female shape; while only about three feet tall, she generally conformed to a female human build, although the curving horns were probably inspired by the efreet who lived on her home plane. And while she had been in this standard form, for one brief moment the flames of her body had elongated and stretched out to the northeast, as if a sudden, hurricane gust of wind had blown her flames in that direction. It had only lasted for a second or so, and then she had resumed her normal form. But it happened again a few seconds again, and then again a few seconds after that, each time with even more force than the previous times.

"What is happening, Master?" asked Infernia, more than a trace of fear in her voice.

"I'm not sure," admitted Telgrane. "Maybe it would be best if you jumped back into your tinder box for now." He opened up the tinder box, and Infernia condensed her body into a thin pillar of fire, arcing it into her travel case as she had done many times in the past, ready to assume her ember form once she had landed properly - but then her arc of flame unwillingly veered away from the tinder box at the last moment, angling over to the northeast, to land several feet away from her intended target. She resumed her humanoid form and looked desperate. "Help me, Master!" she cried. "I am being tugged away!"

Sure enough, she was: every few heartbeats or so, an invisible gust of wind seemed to blow her flames to the northeast, now strong enough to drag her a few feet away in that direction. She tired herself out running in place for awhile, getting dragged away and then running back to where she had been before getting dragged back again. But whatever was causing the effect was definitely growing stronger, and she started losing ground.

Delphyne looked in the direction Infernia was being tugged, and saw only a volcanic mountain range in the distance. "What's causing this?" she wondered aloud.

"Who knows?" replied Telgrane, a bit of desperation apparent in his voice now. "But we need to find out, and put a stop to it!"

By this time, the group was jogging alongside the road leading out of the city and to the mountains, trying to keep up with the poor fire elemental who was being dragged further and further away with each handful of heartbeats. "We're going to lose her at this rate!" warned Delphyne. "We need to be able to keep up!" Coming to a snap decision, she pulled out her broom of flying and ordered Thunderwolf to hop on behind her. "We'll be right back!" she called to the others, before heading back to the city at full speed.

Ten minutes later, the rest of the group was much further down the road, running almost at a sprint to keep up with an increasingly-frantic Infernia, when Thunderwolf and Delphyne rode up on a pair of horses, each pulling another pair behind them on long leads. There were certain perks to be had by being an adventuring companion to the future king of Kordovia, and the instant, no-questions-asked loan of a half dozen horses was just one of them. The others mounted up, and now on horseback had a much easier time keeping up with the errant fire elemental.

"I do not like this, Master!" Infernia cried.

"Hang in there, Infernia!" called Telgrane. "We'll see what's causing this and put a stop to it!"

Infernia's unwilling path took the group straight to the mountains; a cave opening blocked by a massive boulder seemed to be the intended destination. Sure enough, Infernia's small, fiery body was whisked through a narrow gap between the cave wall and the boulder, an opening much too small to permit the passage of any of the heroes. "Hang on, Infernia, we're coming!" called Telgrane, as he leapt off his horse and appraised the situation. "Any ideas?" he asked the group at large.

"Stand aside," commanded Cal, as he dismounted his horse and walked up to the boulder, cracking his knuckles in preparation for a mighty feat of strength. Calling upon the power of Kord, Lord of Strength, he lifted the massive boulder, easily half again as high as a man, and pulled it away from the cave opening. The light from Infernia's flames was just disappearing down a high ledge in the back of the cave, and her plaintive cries for help chilled Telgrane's blood. He raced into the cave, eager to come to the aid of his faithful familiar.

He did not expect to see a dire bear to his right, angry at being awakened from his nap. Nor did he expect to see an enormous cyclops, easily four times the height of a man, rise up from his sleeping furs over to the left and grab up a massive stone hammer, equally angered at the sudden intrusion. But then a thought crossed the giant's simple mind, and a single word from the guttural Giant language spilled from his lips.

Delphyne was the only one familiar with the word, thanks to the unwanted partial memories of Hagatha taking up residence in her brain; it meant "Breakfast!"

Galrich and Aerik leaped forward, weapons drawn, and attacked the dire bear, the closest of the two opponents. Cal and Thunderwolf followed, heading for the cyclops. Delphyne mounted her broom and flew up out of the range of the dire bear, trying to see if she could see where Infernia had been dragged. And Telgrane, eager to get this time-wasting battle over with as soon as possible, summoned one of the most powerful allies he could: a greater fire elemental. Perhaps sensing his preferences, it took on a distinctively feminine form as it manifested.

"How may I serve y--" it started to ask, before its fiery form was sucked across the cave, up to the ledge, and down a curving passageway all in the blink of an eye. It was an interesting data point - whatever was pulling Infernia in hadn't targeted just her, but was apparently affecting all fire elementals in the general vicinity - but it came at a rather high cost, for Telgrane had just burned one of his highest-level spells with no combat effect.

In the meantime, the cyclops and his pet dire bear weren't sure what was going on with all of these fire-people flitting around in their cave, but they were more interested in grabbing and eating some of the fleshy ones in any case. The cyclops swung its massive hammer in a wide arc and clobbered Delphyne off of her broom; she was thrown across the cave and landed in a heap, her broom crashing down at the giant's feet. The world teetered in darkness for a moment as she nearly blacked out, but being thrown so far away from the combat actually worked in her favor, giving her the time to swig down a healing potion and cast a stoneskin upon herself. Then, holding out her hand, she called her broom to her, and it flew across the cave to reach her. She mounted up and was ready to resume the battle - but by that time it was nearly over. Galrich and Aerik had just finished off the powerful dire bear, and were moving over to give Cal and Thunderwolf a hand with the mighty cyclops. Thunderwolf seemed especially appreciative, perhaps realizing he was a bit out of his league against such a powerful foe.

Telgrane, in the meantime, had cast a levitate spell upon himself and was hand-walking across the ceiling over to the ledge. He opened his mind to the mental link he had with Infernia, and was almost immediately sorry he had; the images he was receiving were of a large cavern spinning around and around on a wobbly axis. It was almost as if he were running around in circles in the center of a cavernous subterranean room. He closed down the link for now and continued hand-walking himself over to the ledge, trying to clear his head of the dizziness his brief vision had given him.

The heroes finished off the cyclops shortly, and Delphyne offered to bring the horses into the relative safety of the cave while the guys started climbing up to the ledge, confident that she could easily catch up to them with her broom. It wasn't an easy climb, but they managed okay, and Delphyne caught up with them without fail shortly after they'd all gotten up to the higher level.

There was a passageway at the rear of the ledge that angled downwards, deeper into the mountain. Telgrane had sprinted ahead against all reason, too eager to try to catch up to his kidnapped familiar to wait for the protection of the rest of the group. But he wasn't so far ahead that they weren't able to catch up to him before they all got to the large cavern just beyond.

There was plenty of light in this cavern, provided by a ring of orange flames in the center of the open space. A deep-voiced chanting emanated from the unseen center of the ring of flames. Standing just outside the ring, in defensive postures, were two magma brutes - some of the heroes had encountered one of this strange breed during their combat with the Cult of the Far Realm. Upon seeing the heroes enter the cavern, the two magma brutes turned in their direction and charged. Another pair of magma brutes rushed in from either side of the ring, making four in all, and from inside the ring came nine fire bats, flapping toward the heroes.

Before the charging fire monsters reached the group, Telgrane pinpointed Infernia's voice, calling out "Help me, Master!" It was coming from various points around the ring of fire - indeed, it was as if Infernia were being rotated at great speed along the flame-wall's outer circumference. Telgrane deduced that the circular wall of flames was made up of fire elementals like the one he had just summoned and his own familiar; this supposition was reinforced by the sudden appearance of a Medium fire elemental from another passageway down the left side of the cavern, practically flying through the air to be absorbed into the ring of flames.

Frantically, the spellcasters cast various spells protecting their number from fire, seeing as that was likely to be a deciding factor in the battle to come. Galrich stood where he was and wielded his greatsword, ready to strike the first magma brute to get close enough, but his preparations were ruined by Aerik stepping in front of him to shield his liege from harm. Galrich snorted and stepped off to the side, ready to strike. Unfortunately, the fire bats got there first, and they dived at the heroes, trying futilely to set them ablaze while they clamped on with their sharp, coal-colored teeth. Galrich was swarmed by three of the flying fiends, while Aerik dealt with another two and the rest of the swarm headed for the other heroes.

Before Cal jumped into combat, he took a quick moment to assess the situation. Someone was chanting inside the ring of flames, which was where the fire bats had come from; it was likely that the chanting was calling forth these creatures from the Elemental Plane of Fire, and preventing more of them from being summoned seemed like a pretty good first priority. With that in mind, Cal cast a silence spell on the space at the center of the wall of flames, which rose up 25 feet from the cavern's floor. Then he had to devote his attention to the magma brute that was almost upon him. He readied his hammer of frost for the beast's attack.

Unseen by Cal - or any of the other heroes - the ring of flames hid a crude pentagram carved into the stone floor. Standing inside this pentagram was a fire giant spellcaster by the name of Ignus Bloodstone, whose ritual chanting had suddenly been silenced by the cleric's spell. Just outside the pentagram but inside the wall of flames were Ignus's two bodyguards, stone giants he had infused with magma powers, and whose black skin cracked with the veins of liquid fire contained within their powerful bodies. Ignus had been performing a complicated ritual which called forth all fire elementals from a great distance away to create his protective wall of flames; opened a simultaneous gate to both the Elemental Planes of Fire and Earth; and had just summoned five thoqquas to his side. Had he been allowed to continue, the gate would have become permanent; as it was, this cavern in the Material Plane was attuned to the Elemental Planes of Earth and Fire, and the creatures within it were as comfortable - and as powerful - as if they were on their home planes. It wasn't a permanent effect, thanks to Cal's timely spellcasting, but it would last long enough for Ignus and his allies to deal with these interlopers. At the fire giant's silent hand gestures, the thoqquas each positioned themselves at the five points of the pentagram and started burrowing downward, while the magma stone giants strode unharmed through the wall of flames and headed into battle beside the magma brutes and the fire bats.

Fortunately, the fire bats proved to be fairly weak opponents, and a cone of cold from Delphyne had taken care of most of their number; sadly, this was the only such spell she had prepared, and Telgrane, whose spell preferences tended to lean towards the fire-based effects, found himself with most of his prepared spells likely to be completely useless against creatures who hailed from the Elemental Plane of Fire. Thus, the newly-titled archmage found himself ignoring most of his prepared spells and falling back on a wand of magic missiles.

Still unsure of what might be lurking behind the wall of flames, Cal decided to summon something powerful to go deal with whatever might be there. He stepped back from his current battle with a magma brute and summoned an elder earth elemental in the center of the ring, commanding it to destroy any creatures it found there. As it manifested within the shielded wall of leaping flames, Cal didn't see it appear, and definitely didn't see it shake off the compulsion to obey the edicts of the human cleric who had summoned it to this plane. He was unaware that it had sunk into the stone floor of the cavern and traveled underground in his direction until it suddenly popped up behind him and pounded him with its boulderlike fists.

This caused a shift in the balance of power in the wild, free-for-all melee that was massing over at the side of the cavern. Ignus was left alone inside the circular wall of flames he had constructed, as the adventurers had all they could handle dealing with the magma stone giants and magma brutes, the few remaining fire bats, and now an enraged elder earth elemental. Furthermore, both Cal and Telgrane had been successfully conditioned not to summon anything to their aid, each having seen their powerful allies either whisked away out of the fight or actively used against them. They didn't see the results of the thoqquas' vertical burrowing, as the jagged furrows forming the crude pentagram on the stone cavern floor filled up with magma from deeper below, giving greater power to Ignus and his ritual.

However, despite all of these frustrations and limitations, the adventurers were far from helpless. Cal stepped back out of reach of his latest combatant and cast a blade barrier spell that ran the length of the entire cavern, cutting through two of the magma brutes when it first manifested. This had the effect of keeping the majority of the enemies on the other side of the barrier, allowing the heroes to focus on a smaller number of foes at one time, although the elder earth elemental was able to sink below the spell's effect and reappear on the other side of the whirling blades without harm. It suddenly shifted its attention from Cal to Telgrane, pounding him mercilessly with his stony fists, and more than once the young archmage had to receive healing from Cal to remain in the fight. He also took the opportunity to try out one of the new spells he had recently learned, casting polymorph on himself to assume the form of a Large gold dragon.

And then, in the midst of the chaos of the battle, the wall of flames shifted and started coalescing into a different shape. The sheet of flames lowered, exposing the grinning - if silent - form of Ignus Bloodstone to the group for the first time, while the ring shortened itself into a shorter arc and eventually became a greater flame snake. At the fire giant's beckoning hand, the flame snake hissed and writhed into place over by the blade barrier. Rising up, it shot a cone-shaped blast of dark fire from its mouth, catching both Telgrane - in gold dragon form - and Thunderwolf in its area of effect. The fire was laced with negative energy, which sapped at the very life force of the two heroes. And as the serpent of flames attacked the archmage and the young fighter, a small voice from somewhere in its midsection - a voice recognizable to Telgrane as that of his kidnapped familiar - cried out in horror at this turn of events.

Ignus did his best to join in the fray, but the blade barrier was a formidable impediment, and the fire giant's sorcerer spell selection was somewhat limited. As the heroes were now all shielded from fire-based magic, Ignus found himself in the same boat as Telgrane: by focusing on fire spells, all of his more powerful spells were of limited use against his present foes. One by one, the adventurers were cutting down his allies; even the massive elder earth elemental had eventually been slain. Once the enemies on their side of the blade barrier had been dealt with, the heroes all gathered around Delphyne (Telgrane having resumed his human form by this point), who used her greater teleport spell to move to the far side of the cavern, where they could more effectively deal with their remaining foes.

Ignus saw his dreams of creating a permanent beachhead onto the Material Plane, a place where creatures from the Elemental Planes of Fire and Earth could access this world at will, going up in smoke. But he fought on to the end, and was the next-to-last enemy to be slain, the final foe being the greater flame snake that had been called into being.

But Ignus wasn't the only ones with dreams. In the midst of the battle with the snake-formed living fire, Telgrane experienced what could only be described as a waking dream. He suddenly saw himself falling in battle, his lifeless form collapsing to the unyielding stone of the cavern. He then saw Infernia, by sheer force of will, rip herself from the greater flame snake's body, and rush over to collapse upon her fallen master. Finally, Telgrane saw the unnerving vision of his own body being immolated into a great sheet of flames, which eventually burned away to expose his fully restored body, which then sat up to reveal that it hadn't actually been restored as much as transformed - for his eyeballs had been burned away, leaving twin gouts of flame to leak out of his open sockets. Of Infernia there was no sight; her elemental body had been burned away to merge with that of her master, creating a gestalt being, part of each. And that's when Pinwhistle's divination struck Telgrane: "The burning desire in your heart will keep you alive when all seems lost."

And just as soon as it had happened, the waking dream vanished, and Telgrane was snapped back to reality. He blasted the greater flame snake with his wand of magic missiles, and it seemed only fitting that his was the final stroke which caused the serpentine creature to dissipate into harmless flame. The purloined fire elementals which had been used to comprise its body all disappeared as a candle flame being snuffed; all, that is, but for Infernia, who slowly stood up, stretched, and then - seeing her master unharmed - rushed over to him. "Master!" she cried. "You are unhurt!"

"As are you!" replied Telgrane with a smile, embracing his loyal familiar.

"Come on, let's get out of here," suggested Cal, dismissing the blade barrier which blocked their way.

"Hmmph!" snorted Galrich, looking around at the piles of slain enemies. "Not much in the way of treasure this time, was there?"

"Not so much," agreed Telgrane. "But I'm not complaining."

- - -

I don't mind admitting that this adventure was a deliberate attempt on my part to kill Telgrane. Not because I wanted him dead, but because I thought the sudden application of the half-fire elemental template (which would have been the result of his death and phoenixlike rebirth after Infernia's sacrifice) would be a pleasant surprise. To that end, I had prepared a new initiative card for him had this come to pass; it was the standard Telgrane initiative image with flames pouring out of his eyes. After the greater flame snake failed to kill Telgrane with his breath weapon, and I rolled a "4" when determining how long it would be before he could use it again, I confessed that I was actively trying to kill Telgrane, but I just didn't see as I had the firepower anymore to do so. When Logan wanted to know why I was trying to kill off his archmage, I explained the whole deal (including the true meaning of Pinwhistle's divination), and said I just didn't have the means at my disposal to kill him with the few enemies I had left.

Logan's response: "Try harder!" (At that point, he wanted Telgrane to get killed and come back as a half-fire elemental.) But I pointed out that even though I had actually had a desired end state for this adventure, I wasn't willing to get to my goal by simple DM fiat; events (and my dice) had conspired to prevent that outcome, so we'd press on with the current state of affairs. However, I did tell him that having had that "waking dream," there was nothing preventing Telgrane from researching the ways he might infuse himself with elemental fire energy, and in fact I had a sudden inspiration for an adventure based on just that. (The first thing to leap out at me was the name: "Baptism by Fire.") But that would be several adventures in the future.

But that's the tricky thing with divinations: things don't always play out as you expect, so it's always best to have a "Plan B" on hand.

ADVENTURE 66 - YOU BASTARD!

PC Roster:
Adventures 66 and 67 were written - and played through - concurrently. This one was written pretty much as a standalone solo adventure for Cal; not wanting to have the other players sit around the table watching Dan run his cleric PC on a solo adventure, I wrote a different adventure for their PCs to run through during the same time, and I even had the two mini-adventures occurring at the same time in the game world, because I thought it would be cool if I could arrange for a crossover event between the two adventures. It didn't quite work out that way, but it was still pretty fun.

- - -

A Guild page entered the common area of Wing Three's living quarters and approached Cal. "Guildmaster Farthingale would like a word with you in private," he reported. "He's awaiting you in his office."

Cal frowned as he walked down the hallway toward Farthingale's office, recalling that the last time one of the the Wing Three adventurers had been summoned to the Guildmaster's office it had been a trap, with not Farthingale waiting inside but a doppelganger assassin wearing his form. Cal hadn't prayed for his spells yet this morning, but he was a cleric of Kord, Lord of Strength, and he mentally assessed that he could take on a doppelganger by himself, even unarmed and without spells prepared as he was.

It turned out his hypothesis would remain untested, for it was indeed the real Guildmaster Farthingale waiting for him, not an impostor. "Well, Cal my boy, you’re quite the celebrity around here, I must say," Farthingale chuckled. "But then, I suppose being involved with the direct manifestation of one of the gods will do that for a fellow, won't it?" He smiled over at Cal.

"Well then, to business. As you know, the Adventurers Guild has several investors who have supported us over the years and put in large sums of money to cover some of our operating costs. In return, they occasionally request that we support them in some of their various endeavors – spellcasting, tracking, any of our multiple forms of expertise, really. We have had such a request, from one of our most prestigious – and financially supportive, I might add – investors. He has the need of someone who can cast some of the higher-end divinations, and he has asked for you by name. He's hired on adventurers from your Wing before on two separate occasions, although I don't know that he's ever met you personally. But in any case, that's really all that I know about the specifics of his request. You're to report to his manor, Stanwyck House, for dinner tonight. He's asked that you come alone; apparently the matter you'll be helping him with requires a bit of discretion, and he'd like to keep the number of people 'in the know,' as it were, as low as possible. You're to have as many divination spells ready as possible, which might indicate the nature of the assistance requested.

"I don’t need to remind you how important it is to keep backers like Lord Stanwyck happy, Cal. For the good of our Guild, I ask you to do all you can to assist him in his endeavors. Dinner is served at 8 bells, but you're to arrive an hour early for drinks." And with a hearty slap on the side of the arm, Cal was summarily dismissed from the Guildmaster's newly-refurbished office.

Cal returned to his own quarters and prepared his spells for the day. Despite Lord Stanwyck's demand that Cal prepare only divination spells, he took the precaution of preparing a few other spells that he felt might be handy in a contingency.

The rest of the day went rather quickly. Some of the other members of the group received an invitation to meet Rebecca and Delmond for dinner and drinks at the Pit-Fight; that sounded like a lot more fun to Cal than helping Lord Spencer Stanwyck with whatever problem he needed dealing with - and for free, most likely. But Cal kept to the plan, and by seven bells Cal was being ushered into the grand foyer of Stanwyck Manor by the elderly butler, Carstairs. Cal's cloak was taken and hung up in a closet, and then he was led to an elegantly furnished study with a large portrait over the fireplace of a distinguished-looking man with white streaks in his beard and at his temples.

"Quite the likeness, don't you think?" asked Lord Stanwyck as he walked into the room and approached a sideboard laid out with brandy glasses and a flask of an expensive vintage. "Brandy?" he offered, pouring one for himself. Cal respectably declined, wanting to keep a clear head, and falling back on his usual instincts of not trusting anybody he didn't have to - especially here in a non-combat encounter, where he didn't have his armor or weapons, nor his most powerful combat spells. If Lord Stanwyck was disappointed, he didn't show it - indeed, he carried on with his conversation, especially as it dealt with his favorite subject: himself.

"I had this portrait made by some fancy artist type; there's a copy of it in the Greyhawk Museum of Fine Art. In fact, I hired a few of your Wingmates to get it back for me when it was stolen. Rale was part of that group. He's your ring-partner, isn't he?" Cal confirmed he was.

"I like Rale," offered up Lord Stanwyck. "You wanna know why? Because Rale likes money. I can understand that, and I respect that. I've hired him twice, now, you know: once to kill off the group who kidnapped my son, Edmont, and once to get my portrait back. And he came through both times. And you know why? Because I paid him well to do what I wanted him to do for me." Lord Stanwyck nodded to himself as if agreeing with his own deductions.

"Now, take your spellcasters," he continued. "You got your sorcerers; they hardly count, because their spells come to them naturally. Being born a sorcerer's no different than being born left-handed, or with red hair, or what-have-you. Total luck of the draw.

"Your wizards, though, they gotta figure out spellcasting for themselves. They end up spending their days with their noses buried in spellbooks, working out how to cast those spells that they do. And I gotta respect that, too. I was never one for that sort of thing myself, but I can see they gotta work hard to get their spells. I know all about hard work; it isn't easy keeping one's fortune alive and intact, let alone growing, like I do. Different kind of work, but I understand hard work.

"It's you clerics I don't get. Sure, you got your spells, too, but you didn't study hard to figure them out, and they didn't just come naturally to you like it does for sorcerers. You just got down on your knees and begged a god for 'em. Buncha god-beggars, the lot of you. Now, I can see what you're getting out of the deal - spells - but what I don't see is what the gods are getting by throwing a buncha spells your way. Other than you clerics as their puppets, I suppose. I mean, you grovel like that for your spells, you gotta figure that you're bound to do whatever your god tells you to do, or else he pulls the plug on your spellcasting, and then where are you? Nothing more than a common fighter, that's where."

Cal kept a lid on the sharp retort that had crept to the tip of his tongue, and answered in a more reasonable tone. "Not at all," he replied evenly. "The relationship between a cleric and his deity is a reciprocal--"

"But you're begging for spells, is my point," cut off Lord Stanwyck, and it was only Guildmaster Farthingale's reminder about how much the offensive nobleman aided the Adventurers Guild financially that kept Cal's anger in check. "Perhaps we can put my spells to good use," he suggested. "I believe there was a matter you wanted me to look into...?"

"We'll get to that later," shrugged Lord Stanwyck. "After dinner. Now, I understand you actually got to meet your god in person recently. Tell me about that."

"Oh, you heard about that?" asked Cal.

"I read it in your files," Lord Stanwyck admitted. "One of the perks of throwing money at your Guild is I get to read up on the files they keep on all of you adventuring types."

Cal recounted his recent adventure involving the Gauntlet of Kord, which resulted in an avatar of Kord manifesting before the assembled members of the Church of Kord here in the city. Lord Stanwyck seemed fascinated by the fact that Cal had the blood of Kord running in his veins, and asked all kinds of questions about how it felt, if there were any side effects, if there were any physical characteristics beyond an increase in strength and stamina, and so on. The line of questioning continued until Carstairs returned to the study and informed them that dinner was served.

Dinner was delicious. The elderly butler brought in several courses of exotic dishes, each more sumptuous than the last. Lord Stanwyck continued with small talk over the course of dinner, until finally, when the last plate was cleared away and Carstairs had retreated from the dining room, he began to get down to business.

"Well, I imagine you've been wondering why I asked you here tonight," Lord Spencer said. "I have need of someone with your spellcasting services, and I've been told by your Guildmaster that you can be trusted to be...discrete.

"I am close to 60 years of age. My wife died five years ago, when my son Edmont was only two; he died, as you may know, just this past year. Some of your compatriots were involved in the attempt to rescue him from his kidnappers, and while I don’t blame them for his death, the fact remains that he is dead. I have hired numerous clerics to try to revive him, but the stubborn little...well, he refuses to leave the afterlife. I don't suppose there’s any way to force him--? No, I don’t suppose there is; bad idea anyway, never mind.

"Anyway, I need an heir, Cal, and I’m too old to start anew with a young wife. However, in my younger days...well, let’s just say there's a good chance that I may have an heir or two running around. At this point, I'd take an illegitimate heir over no heir at all."

At this point, Carstairs entered the room with a wooden box and placed it on the table at his master's side. "Thank you, Carstairs, that will be all," Lord Stanwyck said, and waited for the elderly servant to depart. Then, the nobleman got up and opened the lid to the box, pulling out a dirty metal sphere about 3 inches of diameter. "This is all I have left of a woman with whom I once had a dalliance...well," he amended with a smile, "several dalliances, really. She said it belonged to her grandmother. To tell you the truth, I have no idea exactly what it is, but I'm told that if you have something that belongs to the individual you're looking for, it makes scrying on that person that much easier. I was hoping you could scry on the woman – her name was Angelica – and see if she has any children. It's possible, just possible, that one of them might be mine." And with this he tossed the sphere over at Cal for him to examine.

Actually, it was a bit more than that. Cal instinctive tried to dodge the sphere, which hadn't been tossed for him to catch so much as pitched at him. But hampered by the dining room chair in which he was sitting, pushed up close to the table, Cal was unable to dodge the sphere in time. Lord Stanwyck called out "Bindu!" as the sphere was in midair. Upon striking Cal, it seemed to suddenly explode into entangling strands, which entwined around and around Cal's body, pinning his arms to his sides, his wrists to the chair's armrests, and winding all the way down to his ankles. Cal strained against his bonds to no avail. He tried tapping his Guild ring against a hard surface, to "bink" back to Guild Headquarters, but he didn't have the mobility to do so.

So it looked like he was going to have to break his way out. While Lord Stanwyck pulled a thin whistle out of his vest pocket and blew into it - making no sound that Cal could hear - Cal summoned his will for a feat of strength, a part of his heritage as a cleric of Kord. With a sudden surge of power, he strained his muscles against the iron bands of Bilarro which bound him, and actually felt some of the metal strands creak and snap. But he was unable to break completely free; the bands were weakened, but not broken, and the powerful surge of Kordlike strength was leaving his body, its brief moment passed.

While he had been straining against his bonds, a drow wizard had teleported directly behind Cal, summoned by Lord Stanwyck's high-pitched whistle. He pulled a small stone from a pouch and set it whirling around Cal's head. Cal recognized it as an ioun stone of some type, but didn't know its exact properties until he tried to talk - and no noise came from his mouth. It was preventing him from speaking, and the bands of steel encompassing his body were preventing him from simply grabbing the circling stone from buzzing around his head.

"I'm afraid I've only told you a part of the truth," admitted Lord Stanwyck as the drow grabbed up the back of Cal's chair and started dragging him across the room to a stairwell leading down to a lower level below the mansion. "I do need an heir, that much is true – but I've already found him. Soon after your birth, Cal, I kicked both your worthless mother and you out of my home and into the street where she, at least, belonged. I understand you were given to a cousin of hers to raise, and she later took up with some low-life entertainer or some such.

"But getting back to my need for an heir: I have recently been introduced to the advantages of demonic patronage in getting ahead in the world, and the demon my dark-skinned wizard here has summoned has agreed to see to it that I continue to excel in all of my earthly endeavors – provided I sacrifice my own blood to him. As you know, my wretched son Edmont refuses to be budged from his heavenly afterlife, so that, I’m afraid, leaves you in his stead, blood of my blood, and my ticket to a life of undreamt-of wealth and success!"

Cal had heard enough. Despite having already used up his burst of enhanced strength, the blood of Kord still ran in his veins, and he gave every effort in breaking the partially-weakened iron bands of Bilarro. With a sudden snap! they burst asunder, and Cal staggered off of the chair he had been bound to to drop to the floor.

"Damnit, Jhondauri!" called Lord Stanwyck, reaching into a drawer behind him and pulling out a rope. Flinging it at Cal, he cursed, "I told you that iron ball wasn't going to be enough to hold him!" The rope struck Cal and immediately started winding around him, pinning his arms to his shoulders and making its way down his body. In the span of a heartbeat he was bound from chest to ankles by the rope of entanglement.

"Apologies, my Lord!" growled the drow, eyes stabbing in Cal's direction. "It was wise of you to have prepared a backup."

"I gotta think of everything around here!" groused the nobleman. "Now grab him, before he gets away!"

Unable to do much more than hop in his current predicament, Cal dropped to the floor and started rolling. He rolled underneath the dining room table, while the drow tried grabbing him from one side and Lord Stanwyck ran around to the other end to cut him off. In the meantime, Cal did his best to burst the rope of entanglement as he had the iron bands of Bilarro, but this rope had been enhanced with steel fibers, and even Cal's enhanced strength wasn't enough for the task - at least, not at the moment. He had expended a lot of energy in the last few minutes, and needed a breather.

Jhondauri grabbed him by his collar and dragged him out from underneath the dining room table. He then began dragging him back toward the set of stairs leading to the level below. Cal conserved his strength, a silent prayer on his lips.

The lower level contained a hidden room in which a magic circle had been inscribed on the floor in various colored chalk. Before this was a low table, upon which Cal was unceremoniously plopped. He watched as Lord Stanwyck and his pet drow wizard pulled on matching hooded robes, then Jhondauri began the incantations to a spell while the nobleman busied himself testing the edges of what was clearly a ceremonial dagger - which, no doubt, was to be plunged into Cal's heart at the appropriate time. Cal tried cursing his suddenly-revealed father, but the ioun stone consumed his words.

As arcane syllables spilled out of the drow wizard’s mouth, a hulking figure began taking form in the summoning circle. The figure took on the shape of a nalfeshnee demon, a demonic ape/boar hybrid with small wings sprouting from its back. The demon held a large rectangle of dark wood in his hands.

"Who summons Grottlepox?" the demon snarled, looking around the room with hate-filled eyes.

"I, Jhondauri the Forsaken, in the name of Lord Spencer Stanwyck, do summon thee, Mighty Grottlepox!" intoned the drow. "Lord Stanwyck has agreed to your terms and hereby sacrifices his own flesh and blood to you, to do with as you will in your Abyssal infinity!" With that, Lord Stanwyck raised the ceremonial dagger, ready to plunge it down into Cal's chest, as Cal decided there was no more time for rest breaks and struggled mightily to break his bonds.

"Wait!" called out the demon, causing Lord Stanwyck to hold off on making his fatal plunge with the blade. "Am I to believe that this is the son you intend to sacrifice to me?" The demon’s face grew incensed. "I already own this mortal! Are you actually trying to sell my own goods back to me?"

Lord Stanwyck and the drow exchanged a worried look, while Grottlepox reached a hand inside the rectangle he carried and pulled out another just like it.

"Enough of this insult!" the demon roared, turning the new rectangle to face the astonished trio. Cal could see now that it was a mirror. Grottlepox called out a command word, and all of a sudden a new figure appeared in the summoning circle with him.

"What the Hell--?" demanded Galrich, startled to find himself no longer in the alleyway he had occupied a second ago. Looking around in bewilderment, he was even more astonished to find himself standing inside a summoning circle with none other than Grottlepox the Puppeteer, Akari's ancient grandsire. He took a step backwards, readying his greataxe for the attack he knew would be coming next.

And it came, all right - but not in the way he had expected. As Cal gave a silent roar of fury and the rope of entanglement finally shredded to fall on either side of the low table, Grottlepox set down his mirrors and reached a hairy hand at Galrich...

...who, in stepping back, had put his left foot directly onto the chalk summoning circle that had imprisoned the nalfeshnee, thus breaking the circle...

...and pushed him aside, so he could reach out and grab Jhondauri, his massive paw covering the frightened drow wizard's left shoulder, throat, and part of his head. He raised him off of the floor as if he weighed nothing, then spun to face Lord Stanwyck.

"Save me!" called out the terrified nobleman, gripping the sacrificial dagger in both hands but too petrified to use it as a weapon. "I'll pay anything!"

"I don't think so, 'Dad,'" snarled Cal, tossing the captured ioun stone onto the floor at his feet and stepping out of the way as Grottlepox grabbed up Lord Stanwyck in his other clawed hand. He maneuvered his two captives so he was holding them both by their feet in one massive hand, and held his arm up so they dangled in front of his own hideous face. "I haven't had any new puppets for a while now," he snarled. "I can think of all kinds of ways to have some fun with these two!"

Galrich was still trying to figure out just what was going on here, so he fell back to stand beside Cal. "Are we fighting him?" he asked the cleric, puzzled.

"Not this time," Cal replied.

Grottlepox turned to face the two heroes, as he bent to pick up one of his mirrors. "I think our current business here has been completed," he snarled at the heroes, daring them to argue otherwise. Cal, unarmored, without a weapon at hand, and without most of his combat spells, wasn't ready to take on the nalfeshnee standing before him, even with Galrich at his side.

"Agreed," he said, staring up at the hulking demon.

"Good!" snorted Grottlepox, giving his two new future puppets a good shake and laughing as they bleated in terror. "Then I will say goodbye for now. Oh, and Galrich?" he asked as an aside.

"Huh?" asked the half-orc barbarian, still mentally trying to catch up.

"Smile!" said Grottlepox, lifting the mirror up to face Galrich. The barbarian gazed upon his own reflection in the mirror, then caught on too late as he saw the reflection suddenly flinch and try to escape the mirror. His captured reflection had been "used up" in summoning him here to inadvertently aid Grottlepox, and now he had allowed the demon to capture it once again.

"I'll be seeing you...." chortled Grottlepox as he disappeared from view, returning to an eternity in the Muckmire Fens to play with his two new screaming toys.

- - -

And that was that. I informed Dan that it would take the authorities time to verify Cal's claims of his actual lineage, but that eventually (say, by the time we were ready to call the end to this campaign), Cal would be legally recognized as Lord Stanwyck's legal heir, and his estate - such as it was - would be Cal's. Sadly, the estate isn't as large as it would have been, for Lord Stanwyck had recently lost a significant chunk of his money on some failed business dealings - not least of which was paying large sums of money to have some of his business rivals "permanently" dealt with by having them slain with assassin's soul daggers and locked up in the Lockpick Dungeons, never to be seen again...until the Wing Three adventurers freed them.

Hey there -- I've been reading through your write-ups, and I've gotta tell you that this is a tremendous Story Hour. I wanted to see how people go about creating a great story that encompasses an entire adventuring career, and this looks like it. The intertwining of published adventures with homebrew ones seems like a great way to provide a personal touch, without having to plan out all the details of every single episode. I haven't played in thirty years, and we always ran very unstructured homebrew campaigns, which was terrible. So now that I've got little boys of my own, I have in mind to see if they're interested, when the time comes, and I'm excited to see that there's a way to run a campaign that's both structured and engaging. I very, very much also appreciate these aspects of your Story Hour: (1) you give descriptions of important aspects of your gaming preparations and meta-game activities, especially regarding how to deal with small children (non-gamers) and older children (gamers) at the gaming table, and the handouts and emails you use to give in-game details to the players; (2) you go through your homebrews in narrative format, while published adventures are given a brief overview, so as not to spoil those adventures for others who might want to run them; and (3) the Story Hour is well-written. All in all, kudos for hours of entertainment and for showing how to do a table-top RPG right.
Thanks!
~nb

Well thank you, notker biloba, for your kind words. I'm glad you're enjoying the Story Hour, and I'll simply be thrilled if my own example inspires you to run a campaign for your boys when they're older. I've spent many, many hours over the years running D&D games with my own two sons, and it's been a blast for all three of us.

By the way, nice Tom Servo avatar!

Johnathan

ADVENTURE 67 - YOU KILLED KENNY!

PC Roster:
NPC Roster:
As a reminder, this adventure occurred concurrently with "You Bastard!" - while Dan was running Cal through that one, the other players were running their PCs through this short adventure.

- - -

Feron sat in the common area of the Wing Three living quarters, when she suddenly felt the presence of a magical effect swirling around her, like a hidden breeze. Suddenly, an unseen feminine voice whispered, "It's Rebecca, trying out the whispering wind spell. Delmond and I will be at the Pit-Fight tonight. Meet us there at 7 bells for dinner?"

The half-elf smiled. While the Pit-Fight wasn't her favorite eating - or drinking - establishment, she looked forward to seeing Rebecca again. She passed the invitation on to a couple of the other members of Wing Three who were available.

"Can't go," grumbled Cal, heading back to his room after having been summoned to go see Guildmaster Farthingale. "Gotta go see some stupid nobleman on some stupid dinner-date mission."

Hours later, just before 7 bells, a group of five Wing Three adventurers strode up to the Pit-Fight. Feron had convinced Thunderwolf to come simply on the draw of it being a haven for adventurers; the young fighter thought the world of adventurers and was still amazed that he was now working among their ranks on a day-to-day basis. Galrich came along to watch the night's combats in the Pit, and if the future King of Kordovia was going to go, then his trusted bodyguard Aerik was going to be there as well. Telgrane tagged along on the off chance that Dr. Greymantle might show up along with his apprentices; having recently attained the title of Archmage himself, he was eager to appear before the great wizard as someone of equal rank.

Before they could get into the front door, though, they were accosted by a filthy-looking beggar. "Got any excess coppers you might have taking up valuable room in your change-purses?" he asked with a phlegmatic cough. "Old Kenny'd be more than happy to take them off of your hands for you, if you like."

Galrich took the opportunity to fling a small bag of coins at the elderly vagabond. Old Kenny peered inside it and saw the glint of gold, then quickly buried it inside his filthy shirt and looked around to see if any of the lowlifes of the Styes had caught sight of his sudden fortune. "Thank you mightily, m'lord!" stammered the beggar, before hobbling away to some hidden bolt-hole where he slept when not actively begging for coins or scraps of food.

Feron watched the poor old fellow stagger away. "If anybody sees him with that much money on hand, they'll likely slit his throat without a second thought," she commented. "You may have just signed his death warrant."

"He'll be fine," scoffed Galrich. "You don't get to be to his ripe old age without learning a thing or two to surviving in the streets."

"You're right about the 'ripe' part, in any case," remarked Telgrane under his breath, holding a hand over his nose as Old Kenny's less-than-aromatic stench lingered on a bit after the beggar's departure.

The group entered the Pit-Fight and were immediately hailed by Rebecca, who had already reserved a table, and Delmond, who was at the bar grabbing up the evening's first pitcher of ale. Galrich nodded his hello and then ambled over to the Pit to see who was fighting that evening. Aerik, naturally, followed suit. Telgrane sat Feron into a chair by Rebecca and then sat down across the table from them.

One of the waitresses ambled over and took everyone's order. Pork was the main course of the night, as a fierce boar ("Tusky the Terrible," a favored pit-fighter this past week) had been slain just the previous evening in the Pit. Dinner conversation was pleasant, with Dr. Greymantle's two apprentices eager to maintain friendships with people as powerful as the Wing Three adventurers. Dr. Greymantle and Pinwhistle were easily as powerful as those of Wing Three, but they pursued various academic pursuits in lieu of actively adventuring themselves. Telgrane entertained the two with a detailed description of their recent encounter with Ignus Bloodstone, the Magma Mage, up in the volcanic mountains near Kordovia, at which time Rebecca pointed out that Dr. Greymantle - "Thag," as she called him, which earned her some ribbing from Delmond - had been in correspondence with another Archmage who specialized in the study of the Elemental Plane of Fire. Intrigued, Telgrane extracted a promise from Rebecca to find out this Archmage's name, for he said he would love to talk to such a person.

The conversation turned to other topics, such as the apprentices' studies, and then at the 9-bell note Rebecca decided that she and Delmond had best be getting back to Greymantle's manor. They both had their assignments for their wizardly mentor to finish up, write-ups on their most recent magical experiments - Rebecca on the casting of the whispering wind spell, Delmond on the creation of the magical inks necessary to create a scroll containing the disguise self spell. (He'd been having trouble getting the amount of chameleon's blood just right, and offered without any luck to purchase any such ink the adventurers might have on hand.) Everyone finished up the ale in their mugs and went their separate ways, Rebecca and Delmond off to the right from the Pit-Fight's front door and the Wing Three adventurers off to the left.

After several minutes of walking through the now-foggy streets, the group heard a strangled cry coming from an alleyway ahead. Rushing to the alleyway, they saw two forms in an embrace up against a wall, about halfway down the narrow gap between two brick buildings. At the sound of the heroes' approach, one of the two turned to face them, his mouth covered in the blood of his victim. He took a step back, allowing the victim - now visible as none other than the hapless beggar Galrich had tossed a pouch of gold to earlier that evening - to collapse in an unliving heap upon the cobblestones of the filthy alleyway.

"Vampire!" called out Feron, as she cast a call lightning spell to drop a bolt of electricity down upon the vampire. Galrich raced down the alley, his greatsword flashing; Aerik struggled to keep up with his liege. Thunderwolf followed suit, his sentient sword Xanthros in hand, leaving only Feron and Telgrane still standing in the street.

But the vampire wasn't alone, for another of his foul breed stepped from the shadows deeper in the alleyway, and then yet another from the opposite side of the alley. Another dropped down from high up the wall of the building, making four in all.

And then the rats appeared.

This was a great swarm of rats, a gray-brown-black wave of bodies with matted fur and biting incisors, piling onto themselves in an effort to reach the heroes. The Styes was by far the poorest section of Greyhawk City, but these rats were many times over again of a number one would expect to see in even their dirtiest alleyways.

Telgrane took a further step backwards and cast an incendiary cloud spell, using his Archmage training to shape it around his companions so that only the vampires and allied rats were in the burning cloud of vapors. He followed this up by summoning a greater fire elemental, and was pleased to see that this time his summoned ally wasn't immediately whisked away by the forces of an arcane ritual. The fire elemental smashed a flaming fist into the nearest vampire, setting it ablaze.

It was at this time that the last player entered the fray. This was a burly vampire clad in black armor, who stepped up behind Feron and Telgrane and cut at the Archmage with an ebon greatsword. The blade bit deep into Telgrane's side, and he cried out in pain as blood cascaded down his abdomen. As he fell to the cobblestones, his gashed side flowing freely, he popped open his tinder box and Infernia emerged.

"MASTER!" she cried out in alarm at the sight of Telgrane holding his side, blood trickling through his fingers. Then she spun and faced Telgrane's attacker, fury flashing in her eyes. Feron stepped over and cast a healing spell upon the wounded Archmage, and Telgrane felt the deep gash knitting itself shut. "It's a sword of wounding!" he called out to the others, warning them of the greatsword's properties, having learned of them the hard way. Galrich's eyebrows shot up at the warning - he'd always wanted one of those! He spun around and started making his way back to the street, eager to engage the newcomer with the black blade.

Telgrane stepped into the vapors from his incendiary cloud spell, trusting in his ring of fire protection to keep him relatively safe. Infernia, after attacking the black-armored vampire with her fiery fists, stepped back to protect her master.

"It seems Cal is not among their number!" reported the warrior vampire, trading greatsword thrusts and swipes with Galrich. "No matter: keep at least one of them alive, and we'll trade their life for the cleric's god-touched blood!"

"That's what this is all about?" demanded Feron, resuming her lightning strikes and bringing them to bear on the black-clad vampire. By this time, many of the rat swarms had been incinerated by Telgrane's spell or his elder fire elemental, and the alleyway smelled heavily of burned rat. "You want a taste test of Cal's blood?"

"None is more worthy than Jathrig Blacksnake, the Dark Reaver, to sample the blood of a god running through a mortal's veins!" responded the vampire leader; the other undead were apparently his spawn, for they did not seem to have the same level of power or endurance as their vampiric overlord - in fact, by this point, two of them had been slain, reverting to gaseous form and drifting away to blend in with the night's fog.

Thunderwolf was holding his own against one of the vampire spawn deep in the alleyway, but could have done a better job of things without the rats crawling up his legs and biting him with their wicked teeth. He was glad that there was a Huge being composed of living flames at his side, doing as much if not more damage to their undead enemies than Thunderwolf was inflicting with Xanthros. "Keep at it, son!" enthused the sentient blade, cheering on his wielder, and groaning inwardly when the young fighter took the occasional break from battle to scrape rats off of his body with the magic blade.

Still, the Dark Reaver soon discovered that his plan to overpower Cal's adventuring companions was not going at all as he had anticipated; who could have foreseen that the cleric's compatriots were so well-versed in magic? Still, he was a vampire, and he was certain that even if his undead body were slain, he'd be able to escape as mist to his hidden lair beneath the streets, among the sewers of the Styes, to regenerate slowly in his coffin. And he was immortal; there would be other times to try again to gain Cal's deific blood for himself.

And that's exactly what happened. Jathrig Blacksnake fought valiantly and fought hard, but he was outclassed once his four vampire spawn were slain and the remaining rats scattered to safety. As Galrich's final blow nearly cut him in twain, he took a moment to bring his ebon greatsword up in a final salute to a surprisingly worthy foe before exploding into a fine mist, which mingled with the fog and hid the vampire's insubstantial form as it seeped away down a drainage hole.

"Aw, crap!" cried out Galrich in disappointment as he saw the Dark Reaver's sword become mist along with the rest of the vampire's armor and equipment. "I wanted his sword!"

"Well, here's a small consolation prize," said Thunderwolf, scooping up a coin pouch from the slain beggar's side and tossing it to the half-orc, who snatched it out of the air with one hand. "You got your bag of coins back from the old beggar you gave them to."

"Is he dead?" asked Feron, a sad look on her face. Thunderwolf felt for a pulse and then nodded over to the druid, who closed the beggar's eyes and laid him out in a more natural-looking position. "Poor old man," she lamented. "It looks like he had a hard life."

"Well, like I always say--" started Galrich, before disappearing from the rest of the group in the blink of an eye, causing Aerik to nearly die in a fit of apoplexy. "Where'd he go?" the dwarf demanded to the empty alleyway at large. "I'm supposed to be guarding him!"

But there was no obvious answer, for Galrich was gone.

- - -

And of course, having read the previous adventure, you all know exactly where Galrich went. The two groups eventually met back up at the Guild Headquarters and traded stories. As a result, they've learned the following:

• The meaning of Pinwhistle's divination about Cal: "To those subsisting on sips of water, the mere chance for a taste of nectar may be too great a temptation to pass up."
• Grottlepox's mirrors holding the reflections of five of the Wing Three adventurers do not hold them forever but rather release them after a single use. However, they can be "reloaded" if you get your reflection captured in them again.
• Jathrig Blacksnake the Dark Reaver was not permanently defeated, and will likely attack again. Delphyne's hoping she'll be there the next time he attacks, so she can use Thorvik Bleakwinter's amulet on him.

And now that you've read the name of this adventure, if you compare it to the previous adventure's name (and if you're a "South Park" fan) you can see how irresistible it was for me to give the old beggar the name I gave him. What can I say? I failed my Will save and had no choice in the matter!

ADVENTURE 68 - MAZE OF FOOLS

PC Roster:
NPC Roster:
"I'm afraid we found him like this," said Guildmaster Farthingale sadly.

The adventurers looked down at their fallen compatriot, Mercutio Midas. The cleric of Pelor had been a member of Wing Four, but had shared a few adventures with his friends in Wing Three. Now he lay dead in the Guild Hall, his face twisted in a paroxysm of laughter, an expression of deranged glee frozen upon his lifeless features.

"Do we know what killed him?" asked Delphyne.

"No," admitted Farthingale. "And that's part of the oddness of this situation. I've had several Guild clerics try to speak with his spirit; all attempts have failed. We even tried raising him from the dead, with no results. It's as if something is blocking our access to his soul, now that it's been separated from his body."

"Where was he found?" asked Cal.

"In an alley around the corner from our Headquarters, although it doesn't seem likely that he died there. There were no signs of a struggle. So he was probably placed there, as if whoever did this wanted us to find him.

"And there's one other thing," Farthingale said. "This was found gripped tightly in his hands." The rotund Guildmaster handed over a small wooden box, with intricate carvings on each side. Galrich took it from Farthingale and turned it over and over. "What is it?" he asked. "Does it open up?" He tried prying it open, with no success.

Telgrane took the box from the increasingly frustrated barbarian, before Galrich's rage got the better of him and he decided to smash it against a wall. "I've seen boxes like these," the young archmage said. "It's a puzzle box. You generally have to push little latches around, that sort of thing." He, too, tried opening it, with no more success than Galrich had experienced. "Where's Rale?" he asked. "He can probably get this thing open."

Rale, however, hadn't been at hand when Mercutio's body had been brought into the Guild Headquarters building. Delphyne offered to go hunt him up, but then Aerik asked to see it, and with a deft flip, twist, and tug, the top of the wooden box opened up, revealing a deck of cards inside. "Seen these before," he admitted. "Craftsmanship like this, it's likely t'be of dwarven make."

"Is that...is that what I think it is?" asked Cal, almost in awe.

"What do you think it is?" asked Thunderwolf.

"There are tales of a powerful artifact called the deck of many things," Cal replied. "Very dangerous item. You take so many cards out, and each one does something different. You can end up with a pile of treasure, or your soul ripped out of your body and thrown down to the Nine Hells."

"Does a deck of many things have a cute little jester on the back of each card?" asked Delphyne. "Because this one does - look." She pointed to the back of the top card, at the grinning jester drawn therein. She cast a quick detect magic spell on the deck, and after a moment's concentration determined that the deck was not only magical but was radiating an aura of conjuration magic, of the variety most often associated with teleportation or planar travel. Steeling her nerves, she picked up the top card and turned it over.

"It's just a regular playing card," she said, showing everyone the face of the card. She had picked up a joker.

"Let me see," said Cal, picking up the next card. It, too, was a joker, as was the card after that, and the one after that.

"Is this a whole pack of jokers?" asked Telgrane, tipping the rest of the deck into his hand. He fanned the cards out, and they appeared to be a regular deck of cards, with the standard four suits: hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. "Weird," he said. He put the four jokers back into the deck, shuffled them up, and fanned them out again, face down. "Pick a card, any card," he said, offering the deck to Galrich.

Galrich grunted and picked a card. Looking at it, he snorted in disbelief and turned it to show the rest of the group that he had picked a joker.

"But the funny thing is," said Telgrane, flipping through the deck, "there are no jokers in this deck."

"Are you sure?" asked Delphyne, intrigued.

Telgrane counted the cards, and came up with a standard deck of 52, four suits of 13 cards each. A little experimentation showed that if you looked at the whole deck at once, rifling through the cards, it was a standard deck; yet if you only picked one card and looked at it, it was always a joker.

"I fail to see the point of this," commented Cal. "Why would anyone go to the trouble to make a deck of trick cards like this? And what's it got to do with Mercutio?" He tossed the deck of cards back into the wooden box, but one card toppled off the top of the deck and fell onto the kitchen table.

Naturally, it was a joker.

Not only that, but upon hitting the table the card started expanding in size, until it was a full six feet by about three and a half wide. Then, miraculously, the card seemed to hinge upright to a vertical position, leaving a quarter-arc of a cylinder in place behind it as it rose. Finally, once fully upright, the front face of the expanded joker card popped slightly open like a door that was ajar. It creaked as it opened, and there was a faint sound of laughter emanating from deep within it.

The Wing Three adventurers exchanged concerned glances. Then Cal reached over, fully opened the door, and glanced inside.

Inside the doorway was a set of stairs leading down. Viewed through the impossible doorway, the stairs continued down, only the first ten or fifteen feet of steps visible before being swallowed up in darkness. However, viewed from the side of the table, it appeared that there was merely a fourth of a circle sitting on top of the table, but nothing underneath it, certainly not stairs leading down. Galrich swung his greatsword underneath the table just to make sure, and it didn't hit anything.

"Do we go in?" asked Delphyne, looking over at Cal.

"It's our only lead to find out what happened to Mercutio," he replied. "I say we do."

"Good luck," replied Farthingale. "I'll send the rest of your Wing down here to your kitchen to guard the door while you explore what's inside it."

Entering the doorway involved climbing up onto the kitchen table, but a handily-placed chair made the ascent easy, even though the hardwood chair groaned and squeaked as the armored adventurers each put their weight upon it. Cal led the way, the others following.

Time seemed to pass oddly on the stairs. It was hard to say whether an hour or several passed while the adventurers continued down the dark stairs. Gravity seemed odd as well, for the stairs weren't heading straight down at a standard angle, but rather wobbled first one way and then the other, occasionally even doing a complete loop in one direction; in each case, gravity seemed to pull the heroes in the direction of the stairs immediately before them. And the same sporadic laughter echoed throughout the stairwell as they traveled down the expanse.

Eventually, though, the stairs came to an end, and a closed door stood before Cal. He scowled at it, ready to curse it into oblivion if it was locked after all of this, but it opened easily at his touch, spilling into a narrow room. The far end came to a point, holding the painted statue of a capering jester. Two side corridors branched off in opposite directions near the statue.

Before anyone actually entered the room, the spellcasters took the opportunity to cast their pre-battle buffing spells. Cal, Delphyne, and Telgrane made use of stoneskin spells, and Cal further boostered himself with a death ward spell. Telgrane cast a Rary's telepathic bond spell, so they'd all be able to communicate silently between themselves as needed. He also released Infernia from her tinder box. And then, gingerly, the group entered the room, not sure of what to expect.

The statue was the only feature of note in the room, so Cal walked up to it and examined it closely. As he was staring at it, another face popped out of the statue's face and yelled "Boo!" This new face was a duplicate of that of the statue, and the rest of the capering fool stepped out from the statue, gliding effortlessly through the solid carving.

"Welcome, welcome!" he said with a wide grin. "What a surprise! We haven't had any guests here since...the last time!" He held out his left hand, and an open ledger suddenly materialized into it. He held out his right hand, and a feather quill pen popped into existence, its tip wet with fresh ink. "I am your host, the Prime Fool. Please step forward, one at a time, and give me your name for the record," he said. "If you do not have a name, one will be provided to you at no cost." And then he grinned a wide grin and looked expectantly at Cal.

Cal looked at the rest of his adventuring group, and then looked back at the Prime Fool. He seemed harmless enough; what could it hurt? "Cal," he said brusquely.

"Cal?" repeated the Prime Fool. "Boring! Let's see," he said, circling Cal with an observant and critical eye. "An obvious cleric, and is that a holy symbol of Kord around your neck? Let's see, I think I'll call you...'Musclebutt.'" And he made a great showing of writing "Musclebutt" into his ledger, tickling himself with the feather as he did so.

"Next?" he called, stepping up to Delphyne. She gave her name, but once again the Prime Fool wasn't satisfied with it. He walked around her, examining her intensely. "Let's see, dark clothing, carrying a broom...you're either the scullery maid or a witch. 'Witchy-Poo!'" he designated her, writing the nickname into his ledger.

Next up was Thunderwolf, who was designated "New Guy," for the Prime Fool had latched on to the fact that he was younger than the rest of the group. Telgrane and Infernia were designated "Hot Stuff" and "Little Hottie," respectively. Galrich was entered into the ledger as "Temper Tantrum" - the Prime Fool having deduced the half-orc's barbarian heritage, with its rage-based powers - and Aerik's dwarven scowl earned him the nickname "Mr. Grumpypants."

"But I have yet to give you your official greeting!" said the Prime Fool, chiding himself as the ledger book and ink-pen disappeared with a snap of his fingers. And then he gave the group a wide grin...and burst into song.

THE PRIME FOOL'S SONG said:

Welcome, all you boys and ghouls
Welcome to my Maze of Fools
You might think you don't belong
But you won't think that for too long

Please accept my invitation
Cause no pause or...hesitation
Make yourselves all right at home
Stay right here or try to roam

You'll find it makes no difference
Because despite your preference
This is where you're here to stay
Eternity begins today

But please don't worry your sweet heads
It's so much comfier when dead
You're still alive? Well, shucks and drat!
Let's see what we can do 'bout that!

And sanity, it's overrated
It's bothersome; I'm sure you hate it
So while we're killing you pell-mell
Let's whisk those frisky minds as well!

I think you'll find undeath improved
When you're insane, your mind removed
It's much more fun without your cares
So goodbye, you grey cells upstairs!

And now my song is nearly done
It's time to get on with the fun
So look around and choose your deaths
It's time to take your final breaths

And I'll be with you when you do
'Cause I want to be friends with you
So pick a death, and make it clever
And we'll all be best friends -- forever!

Ah HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Click to expand...

And with that, the Prime Fool vanished from sight, leaving only his laughter echoing in the room.

"Interesting guy," commented Telgrane. "Did anybody get a read on him?"

"Evil," reported Cal, who had cast a detect evil spell on him as he capered and cavorted around the adventurers during his song.

"And incorporeal," added Delphyne. "I tried brushing up against him as he danced past, and my hand went right through him."

"So, ghost?" asked Telgrane to the group at large. It seemed as likely a guess as any.

"Uh, guys?" interrupted Thunderwolf. "Look at the door." As one, everyone looked back at the door they had passed through upon exiting the stairs. Actually, a better way to phrase that would be to say they looked back at where the door had been, for the wall was now blank, and showed no signs of ever having held a door. Galrich and Aerik examined the wall thoroughly, but could see no signs of the door. It wasn't well-hidden or covered, it was simply not there any more.

"I want to try something," said Cal, as he activated his Guild ring, preparing to bink back to the Wing Three living area in the Adventurers Guild Headquarters building. As he had expected, nothing happened. "We're on another plane," he reported to the group. "Well then, I guess we'll have to explore this Maze of Fools and find another way out." Looking at the two exit passageways by the statue of the Prime Fool, he randomly went to the left, the others following. Telgrane, the last in line, peeked down the other corridor, and saw that it opened into a small room.

"Hey, guys, let's check this out first!" he suggested, heading down that way, the light from his fire elemental familiar providing him with enough illumination to see by. The others turned to see what he had discovered, and started following him into the room.

Upon Telgrane's entrance into the room, a circular section of the floor slid aside and a large stone throne started raising up from beneath the floor, slowly rotating as it went. Upon stopping, the group saw they were now facing a skeletal being in rotting robes sitting regally in the throne. He glared at them, there was a flash from his eyes, and suddenly most of the group was gone. Only Telgrane, Infernia, and Delphyne still stood in the room, facing the undead being. However, the Rary's telepathic bond spell was still active, and sounds of surprise cascaded over its mental thought-channels.

"I'm in a wide passageway of some sort," reported Cal. "It's a dead end."

"I'm in a dark room!" called Galrich over the link. "No doors, just a ladder going up!"

"My liege!" cried Aerik in surprise. "I'll try to find a way back to ye! I'm in...a large room...filled with, uh..."

"Aerik?" called Cal. "Are you okay?"

"...mimes," finished the dwarf. "I'm in a room with a bunch of bloody mimes. An' they're all playin' that 'I'm in an invisible box' game."

"Thunderwolf?" asked Delphyne over the link. "Are you okay? Where are you?"

"Busy!" called back the young fighter, who had suddenly found himself in an octagonal room with only a bone naga for company. And despite the bone naga's cheery jester's cap - complete with jingling bells at the tips, which it wore at a rakish angle - it seemed no more cheerful than the typical undead creatures Thunderwolf had encountered thus far in his adventuring career. This seemed especially true when it started casting spells in an attempt to kill the young fighter who had suddenly appeared in its clutches.

The crypt thing didn't last long, its undead form totally engulfed in a gout of flame by Telgrane's fireball spell. Delphyne, ready to back up Telgrane's spell with one of her own, had the presence of mind to ensure her spell was needed before casting it; the crypt thing's body collapsed in a pile of blackened bones, so she reserved her spell for future use.

"We're going to need to find a way to link back up," she called over the telepathic bond. "Those of you not in immediate battle, try to map out your locations on whatever you have handy." Telgrane unrolled a scroll and cast a prestidigitation spell upon a piece of charcoal he had in a pouch, using it to draw their immediate surroundings. Cal sketched his location on a scrap of parchment and worked his way through his section of the maze. Thunderwolf wasn't able to immediately comply, finding himself in pitched battle with the bone naga; it had cast a spider climb spell and scurried up to the room's ceiling, from where it thought it could blast the fighter from a place of safety, but didn't count on Thunderwolf sheathing Xanthros and pulling out his longbow. The two took pot-shots at each other from a distance, Xanthros calling mental encouragement to his wielder despite not currently being the weapon of choice. When Thunderwolf's will wavered and he gave serious thought about dropping the attack to guzzle down a healing potion, Xanthros spurred him on to killing his enemy before attending to his own healing, suggesting - quite rightly - that the naga's spells would inflict more damage than he could heal by drinking down potions, and the best defense in this case was a strong offense. Xanthros was absolutely right, and after a pitched battle Thunderwolf found himself with all the time he needed to drink healing potions, his bone naga enemy now a pile of scattered bones in the corner of the room where it had fallen upon being destroyed.

Mapping was also the furthest thing from Aerik's mind, as he had discovered two things about the mimes: one, they were zombies dressed up in mime gear; and two, they weren't miming being in an invisible box - instead, they were mindlessly navigating a large room filled with invisible walls of force. Aerik had discovered this last item the hard way, by trying to rush the nearest zombie mime and running face-first into an invisible wall of force. From that point on, he had to feel his way through the invisible maze with his left hand while his right held his dwarven greataxe at the ready for chopping when he did finally find his way to a zombie mime.

Galrich, meanwhile, was in an oddly-shaped room, basically an equilateral right triangle with one of its shorter ends merged up against a square. On the diagonal wall there was a metal ladder leading up into the ceiling above. There was no illumination within the room, but that was all right - as a half-orc, Galrich could see perfectly fine, and could likewise see that there were no doors out of the room. However, when he started to climb the ladder, he discovered that the metal had been sharpened to a razor-fineness, and he cut both hands trying to climb it. Testing the two vertical edges, he found that even these were razor-sharp. "Stupid maze!" he roared in frustration, before clamping down on his rage and using his intellect for once. If the ladder's a fake exit, he reasoned, then there has to be another way out of here! A methodical search uncovered a secret door; sliding it open, Galrich was rewarded with a section of wide, mazelike passageways of the same type Cal had described. He opened his pack to search for a scrap of paper and some method of drawing on it so he could start mapping where he'd been, eventually settling on using his own dripping blood from his lacerated hands.

Cal, in the meantime, had followed several maze passageways into a larger room with three entrances. Floating in the middle of the room was a dark-colored beholder, similar in build to the ones the cleric had encountered before in previous adventures. This one, however, was different; instead of an anti-magic ray emanating from its central eye, this one had a ray of enervation which tried sucking out the life force of anyone standing within its area of effect. Fortunately, Cal's death ward kept the eye ray from having any effect upon his life energy, and the eye of darkness blasted him with various other rays from its smaller eyestalks.

Just as Cal was racing towards the eye of darkness, the Prime Fool manifested in the area, a gleeful look on his face indicating that he was looking forward to watching Cal undergo the death he had chosen. Cal's response was for the benefit of both creatures: a holy word spell, which caused the Prime Fool to temporarily lose both his vision and his hearing. He choked back a cry and disappeared from view, skedaddling until his vision and hearing returned a short time later. The beholder variant didn't get off as as easily, as it was not only deafened and blinded by Cal's spell but paralyzed as well; it was unable to resist as Cal made a coup de grace attack with his hammer of frost, killing the beast in a single mighty blow.

There was a single door from the octagonal room in which Thunderwolf had slain the bone naga; exiting through it, Thunderwolf found himself in a wide passageway that made two right turns before leading to another closed door, with the longest wall holding a warped mirror. As he approached, Thunderwolf saw his own reflection warp and move - one moment he appeared to be tall and thin from the waist up with short, stumpy legs; the next, he looked to be three times as wide as he was tall. However, Thunderwolf was not expecting his mutating reflection to pull itself out of the mirror and approach him to attack. Worse yet, the reflection's version of Xanthros was as flexible in shape as its own malleable body, and Thunderwolf found himself in the unenviable position of fighting a version of himself that had a greater reach and a larger weapon by dint of its size-stretching properties. Upon his own sentient sword's recommendation, Thunderwolf backed away from his odd reflection and peppered it from a distance with arrows. Despite having a twisted version of Thunderwolf's own longbow strapped to its back, the mirror-Thunderwolf seemed intent upon sticking with the mirror-Xanthros it gripped in an ever-changing hand, and to the young fighter's satisfaction the twisted thing shattered into several hundred pieces of glass shards upon being slain by Thunderwolf's arrows. The glass shards melted immediately like snow, and Thunderwolf looked hesitantly back at the funhouse mirror on the wall, but while it was still intact - and showing an ever-changing reflection of Thunderwolf in its distorting ripples - the manifestation effect apparently only worked once per victim, and his new reflection remained bound to the warped mirror.

Thunderwolf breathed a sigh of relief and headed towards the far door, but was suddenly stopped by the appearance of the Prime Fool, who manifested immediately in front of it, blocking the way with his insubstantial body. "You don't want to go in there!" insisted the mask-clad jester. "That room is no fun at all! Let's go find some other interesting monsters for you to fight!" But as Xanthros pointed out, if the Prime Fool didn't want Thunderwolf going into the room beyond the door, it was probably in the fighter's best interests to find out why, so he put his hand through the ghost's body and turned the doorknob. "You're no fun at all!" complained the Prime Fool, disappearing to go haunt somebody else for awhile.

While this was happening, Telgrane, Infernia, and Delphyne had found their way through various twisting branches of the maze to a small room inhabited by five skeletons. They were easily dispatched, but upon their distruction each skeleton shattered into myriad bone splinters which whipped about in a small whirlwind on the spot they had been slain. Faced with bone-shard mini-versions of a blade barrier spell before them, the two spellcasters opted to go another way.

Galrich wandered around numerous passageways before finding himself entering a large room with two other entrances. Of obvious interest was the round lump of dark flesh lying in the center of the chamber, with numerous appendages twitching randomly. Then out from behind stepped an armored figure wielding a hammer in one hand and a shield in the other. Galrich tensed his grip on his greataxe until he saw that it was none other than Cal. After determining to their mutual satisfaction that they were both who they appeared to be, they compared maps and saw that between the two of them they had apparently mapped out an entire level of the maze, with only a section in the middle unaccounted for. They started immediately searching for a secret way into this hidden section, encountering a gelatinous cube during their exploration. After dispatching it, they did eventually find a secret door which led to a room very much like a mirror image of the room Galrich had first been shunted to, although this ladder was no trap. Cal cautiously climbed up it, with Galrich behind him, and together the two climbed up several scores of feet through a triangular vertical passageway before hitting the ceiling. Cal looked around, figuring out how to unlock what was obviously a trap door which should open into the floor of the level above.

Delphyne and Telgrane, in the meantime, had encountered another room of five skeletons, but these were covered in fungus and mold and emitted clouds of spores in a wide radius all about them. Still, this was nothing that another fireball spell couldn't handle, and they made their way through that room and followed a path through the maze leading to another undead denizen, this time a mummified minotaur. This creature gave them a bit more fight than did either of the two batches of skeletons, but the end result was the same: destruction by flame-based spells.

Thunderwolf, meanwhile, had entered the room the Prime Fool had wanted him to stay out of and found an unexpected sight: a skeleton sitting in a weathered old wooden rocking chair, slowly rocking back and forth, back and forth, while holding a baby-sized skeleton against her shoulder. Various globes floated throughout the room, providing feeble illumination, but enough to see a rickety wooden crib sitting unused in the corner of the room. The rocking skeleton turned its head slowly and stared at Thunderwolf's entry, but made no move to attack; it just continued its slow rocking, and the nervous fighter could see its bony fingers patting the baby skeleton's spine, creating a soft tap-tap-tapping sound as it did so. Upon the urging of Xanthros, Thunderwolf bit back his fear and confusion and stepped fully into the room, touching the first of the hovering globes.

Doing so caused the mists it seemed to hold within its crystal sphere to swirl and coalesce into a moving image: a young man and a young woman getting married at a small temple in a village. "We'll always be together," the man said to his new wife, and she smiled back at him.

Thunderwolf approached another floating sphere and touched it. He was rewarded by another image: the woman giving birth to a son, who was wrapped up in a warm blanket. Getting the idea that these images told an ongoing story, he touched each of them in turn and was rewarded with a series of scenes: the woman feeling the year-old baby's forehead, and turning to her husband, saying, "He's feverish." Her husband felt her forehead, and replied, "So are you." He put on a heavy coat and said, "I'll fetch medicine from the healer." The woman replied nervously, "We'll wait right here for your return. Please hurry." She sat in a rocking chair, slowly rocking her baby to sleep; Thunderwolf glanced over at the skeleton over in the corner of the room and confirmed the rocking chair looked the same as the one in the glass sphere. Moving on to the next hovering globe, he saw the man in a forest, struggling through a heavy snowstorm. He slipped on a patch of ice, struck his head on a tree trunk, and passed out. The next scene was of the man waking, covered in snow and nearly frozen to death, as two hunters pulled him up off the ground. "How long have you been out here?" one asked. "We've been snowed in for nearly three days!" The next scene was of the man, dropping to his knees in anguish at the sight of his dead wife and son, their bodies still waiting for him in the rocking chair, unmoving. And the final globe showed the man, somewhat older, reading a necromantic tome bound in black leather. A harlequin mask hung on the wall behind him. Thunderwolf realized he'd just witnessed the life story of the Prime Fool, memories the undead necromancer had wanted buried away. He turned to the rocking skeleton, unsure of what to say, and stepped back out of the room, closing the door reverently behind him, before telling the rest of the group over the telepathic bond what he had seen.

Telgrane looked over his own map as Thunderwolf described the rooms he'd been in, and came to a shocking realization: the octagonal room with the bone naga, the funhouse mirror room, and the room housing the Prime Fool's skeletal wife and son fit perfectly around the room where the group had encountered the crypt thing. "I know where you are!" Telgrane said over the link. "Go back to the room with the bone naga; there's got to be a secret door out of there." He also quizzed Cal about the vertical passageway he was traversing with Galrich, and pinpointed its location on his own map. According to the negative space on the group's individual maps, Galrich and Cal had come from a lower level, were climbing through the main level upon which they had all entered the Maze of Fools (and upon which level Telgrane, Infernia, Delphyne, and Thunderwolf were still present), and were headed for a level above them. Telgrane rushed over to where his map suggested the vertical passageway was located, and cast a disintegrate spell on that section of wall. He had been correct - it led to the triangular passageway currently being used by Cal and Galrich. Fortunately, the two were already high above them at the top of the passageway, Cal having successfully unlocked the trap door in the ceiling and popped it open to climb onto the level above.

They were confronted almost immediately by a zombie mime. Cal blasted it with his holy symbol of Kord in an outstretched hand, and it flew apart into dust. Oddly enough, the one immediately behind it was unaffected, but that was because it was protected behind a wall of force. Aerik maneuvered his way over to the others, and together they made their way over to the only odd feature of this level: a seven-foot square of metal hanging on an outer wall, upon which was painted a black circle some 5 feet in diameter.

Thunderwolf had made it back to the octagonal room the crypt thing had shunted him to, but was having difficulties discovering the secret passage out of that room. Knowing exactly where he was, Delphyne and Telgrane agreed to use one of the witch's prepared dimension door spells to teleport themselves over to the fighter so they could help him find a way to the others.

That turned out to be a mistake. Delphyne said the verbal components of the spell correctly, but instead of ending up in the octagonal room with Thunderwolf, they instead found themselves in the center of a large, rectangular room with four straight flights of stairs against the longer walls leading up to the corners of the room. The floor was scattered with all sorts of bones, from creatures the size of humans and elves to great beasts like dinosaurs and dragons. And, sure enough, upon the heroes' entrance, the bones started moving of their own accord, coalescing into a massive, snakelike beast with the head of a dragon. As it was forming, Delphyne whipped the broom from her back and leapt on it, Telgrane jumping on behind her, and Infernia leaping into her tinder box. They raced to the top of one of the stairs before the boneyard had fully formed; Delphyne tested the ceiling for traps doors - there were none - while Telgrane sealed off the stairs they were on and the one at the other end of the same wall with a wall of fire. The boneyard, being of limited intelligence, snapped its draconic jaws at Telgrane through the wall of fire, taking damage at it did so. Delphyne flew over to the other set of stairs to try her luck there, while Telgrane reinforced his original wall of fire with another one directly in front of it. While the boneyard shuddered and shifted and extracted a second creature from its own mass, this one taking the form of a skeletal tyrannosaurus, it took twice as much damage from the parallel walls of fire.

Once Delphyne had determined there was no trap door in the ceiling of the second set of stairs, they knew they'd have to get across the room to the other two sets. But there was no point in doing so immediately, especially when these undead guardians had no sense of self-preservation, and waited for them to immolate themselves by trying to bite at the two heroes. After a short while, that's exactly what happened, and both creatures collapsed into a pile of burning and blackened bones. Telgrane dismissed the twin walls of fire, Infernia jumped back out of her tinder box, and the three headed over to another set of stairs.

While all of this was happening, Thunderwolf discovered the secret door from the octagonal room he was in, and found his way to the vertical shaft. Climbing up to the "zombie mime level," he was reunited with Cal, Galrich, and Aerik, and assisted them in clearing out the last of the ridiculously-dressed zombies. Cal cast a detect magic spell on the item hanging on the wall, and determined it was similar to a portable hole, but only worked when it lay flat on the ground. Since the item was a 7-foot square and the invisible walls of force making up the maze on this level were based on a 5-foot grid, that seemed problematic, especially as nobody had bothered drawing out the map for this level. With a sigh of frustration, the group started doing just that.

Meanwhile, just as Delphyne was about to step onto the third set of stairs, a now-familiar entity popped into existence just before her. "I'm starting to get the idea that you people don't like it here!" snarled the Prime Fool, swinging a mace whose head was an animated jester's head who giggled as it swung at the young witch. "That you don't want to be my friends!" A second swing hit Telgrane on the side of the head, as he stepped up to assist Delphyne. A sudden mental compulsion overwhelmed his senses, and he collapsed to the ground in a fit of laughter, tickled insensate at the thought that the Prime Fool had set this all up for them and they were being ridiculously, incredibly foolishly ungrateful for his efforts.

The Prime Fool waved a hand, and a second harlequin materialized behind Delphyne, who had stepped back out of range of the Prime Fool's jester-mace, which still giggled and shrieked in excitement as it was whizzed through the air at each swing. This Secondary Fool was dressed in a gaudy blue and green getup, as opposed to the more somber-looking black of the Prime Fool.

"Ah!" exclaimed the Secondary Fool. "A meeting in the mysterious, menacing Maze 'tween the masters of mystic might and a merry master of mirth! Many men marvel at my magical, madcap madness, marking me as a mythical madman, a marauding menace, a maniacal malefactor! Malarkey! I am but a misunderstood moonchild, a man of moxie, a maker of mischief, miserably maligned by misinformed misanthropes! Mayhap your manifold memories hold mention of me?"

"No, sorry," replied Delphyne, backing away from the newcomer. She reasoned that this Secondary Fool was likely a ghost as well, and that force effects would have the best effect against his incorporeal body; thus she used her wand of magic missiles against him, smiling as the missiles struck him and he grunted as they hit. "I don't think we've ever met. Why? Who are you?"

"My name?" asked the Secondary Fool. "'Tis missing, melting like mercury, murky as mist, no more measurable than the most meager of moonbeams at midnight," and he threw a series of punches at the witch, who dodged them and scampered backwards out of the way. The Prime Fool, in the meantime, was taking his frustrations out on a prostrate Telgrane, who was still bowled over with laughter from the ghost's jester-mace. Infernia bravely stepped up to protect her master, but found that ghosts were particularly difficult to set ablaze.

"But no matter!" replied the Secondary Fool. "What matters most is my main mission: to morph you into mere mincemeat, to murder each member and move you merrily to the morgue!" But his boasts were more than he could carry through, and he fell before a barrage of magic missiles before he could catch up to Delphyne. Upon his death, his incorporeal body became an emerald mist, which flew over to Telgrane's body and entered the wooden box of cards that he still carried since being given them by Guildmaster Farthingale. By that time, the mirth effect of the Prime Fool's jester-mace had worn off, and Telgrane picked himself up off the floor. He, too, had a wand of magic missiles, and together he and Delphyne blasted the Prime Fool into non-existence. The undead jester's last words were a plaintive whine: "You guys are no fu-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-un!"

The Prime Fool simply disintegrated; he didn't become an emerald-hued body of mist, nor did he immediately make a bee-line for the wooden box of cards that had been found on Mercutio Midas's corpse. Intrigued, Telgrane opened the box and took out the top card. It was a joker, but the joker's face was unmistakably that of Mercutio Midas. And it was then that everything fell into place: Telgrane remembered hearing that Mercutio, upon first introducing himself to the group, had made a point of sticking in as many words beginning with 'M' as he could. The Secondary Fool was none other than the undead spirit of Mercutio Midas, trapped in the Maze of Fools after having been slain here, which explained why it had been impossible to raise him or use a speak with dead spell upon his dead body: the Maze of Fools was a soul trap, designed to keep the souls of those slain here trapped within its confines. With any luck, finding a way out of the Maze of Fools and back home would allow Mercutio to be resurrected, as his soul now seemed to be imbued upon one of the playing cards in the deck. Telgrane returned the card to the deck, the deck to the box, and secured the box's lid. "Let's get back to the others," he suggested.

That turned out to be fairly easy, as the top of the third set of stairs did indeed have a trap door in the ceiling, which led to the lower level of the maze where Cal and Galrich had met back up. Following their directions over the telepathic bond, Delphyne, Telgrane, and Infernia managed to find the ladder to the "zombie mime" level, and the entire group was once again together since first meeting up with the crypt thing.

It took awhile for the group to map out the location of all of the invisible walls of force, but eventually the mapping was complete.

"There's nowhere for the portable hole to fit flat on the floor!" complained Cal upon looking at the finished map.

"Let me see," asked Telgrane, examining the map. He found one square that had no walls on either of its four edges, which allowed the metal plate to be put into place diagonally. Upon doing so, the center of the black circle started draining away like sand from an hourglass, and the hole expanded in size until all of the black was gone; in its place, there was now a 5-foot-diameter hole leading down through the floor and to an as-yet-unexplored level of the maze. Cal pounded a piton into the floor, tied a rope to it, and sent an eager Galrich down first. (Or he tried to, at least; Aerik insisted on going before his liege.) One by one the group dropped down to the next level.

This new level was a maze of wider dimensions, with passageways some 15 feet wide. The first creature they discovered was a 9-foot-tall zombie whose eyes, mouth, nose, and ears had all been sewn shut. The reason for this was discovered when Galrich sliced through the creature's midsection with his greataxe, releasing an insanity mist which quickly spread throughout the room, encompassing all within its cloud of noxious vapors. Fortunately, the heroes were able to shrug off the mist's effects until Telgrane could lob a fireball into the room, incinerating the zombie hulk and burning the mist away to nothingness. Shortly thereafter, they encountered a skeletal cyclops, whose sole eye socket could unerringly shoot magic missiles at the heroes from a distance. Cal stepped to the front and successfully turned it, and it fled to a dead end of the maze.

Finally, the group found a narrow passageway at the end of one of the larger ones. There was a silver mirror along a diagonal at the entrance, and the narrow passageway went along the entire length of the Maze before turning back and going back the way it had come. As each of these turns had a diagonal mirror set along its length, the group reasoned this was an easy way for the skeletal cyclops' magic missiles to be shot from a great distance at anyone traversing its length. As a precaution, they smashed the mirrors as they encountered them.

Eventually, the narrow passageway led to a dead end, but a successful examination of the passageway's end revealed a secret passageway. This, at long last, seemed to lead out of the Maze of Fools, for it opened into what looked to be a natural cavern, complete with stalactites and stalagmites, a pile of treasure scattered along the center of the stone floor...and an enraged adult shadow dragon scowling at the sudden appearance of a group of humanoids into its personal den.

The battle was fierce, but relatively short. The dragon caught four of the group in its life-draining breath weapon, but each member of the group managed to resist its effects - Cal only due to the death ward spell that was still active on his body. Telgrane then used his archmage ability to shape the areas of spell effects to create first an incendiary cloud, then an overlapping cloudkill spell that entirely covered the dragon's position and the area around it, with the exception of a narrow passageway directly in front of it, where the other heroes could attack it without succumbing to Telgrane's spell's effects. Galrich took the opportunity thus provided to charge the dark-scaled dragon, slamming his greataxe deep into its flesh with a battle-cry of rage. Aerik ran up as well, but his way was blocked by his own liege, and he vowed to grab up a ranged weapon of some type in the future. However, the cloud-corridor gave Thunderwolf ample space to shoot arrows at the shadow dragon from afar, and likewise for Cal to cast a flame strike down upon the beast. The dragon, nearer to death in mere moments than it had been in years, decided that discretion was indeed the better part of valor and used a dimension door to escape to the surface, from which it took immediate flight.

The heroes gathered up the dragon's scattered treasure, which besides gems and coins also included a few magic weapons and useful items, and then everyone turned to Cal with looks of absolute readiness to return home. The cleric of Kord cast his plane shift spell, and the group was instantly transported to a dark forest somewhere on Oerth, from where Delphyne was able to cast a greater teleport spell to get them all back to Headquarters.

Telgrane's suppositions were correct, and within a day Mercutio Midas was once again among the living. He had no memories of the time after his death at the hands of the Prime Fool, but good-naturedly congratulated them on their efforts on his behalf and decided on the spot that he owed them all a drink - an offer, it should be said, that was agree to immediately.

- - -

I was a little concerned that a five-level maze would come to be incredibly tedious, but I wanted to give it a try anyway. I did take some shortcuts, though, such as hand-waving the battles between Aerik and the zombie mimes, simply skipping their turns when they arose, reasoning that the mimes weren't much of a match for him, anyway. Likewise, I didn't bother with making them figuring out the location of the invisible walls of force, rather just handling the players a pre-drawn map of the "zombie-mime" level when they got to that point.

I also adapted my methods for this adventure, which was played over two game sessions. For the first session, after the group was scattered by the crypt thing's attacks (bless you, Logan, for having Telgrane check out the crypt thing's room when the group was moving in the other direction!), I used Dungeon Tiles and a pile of dominoes to map out the sections of the Maze that each player could see, but that was excruciatingly slow and quickly ate up all of the available table space. So for the second session, I retroactively allowed each PC to have mapped out what they'd seen thus far, and provided each player (or group, as Vicki's and Logan's PCs were still together) with their section of the maze. That made things go much faster.

Alas, the whole "the Secondary Fool is really Mercutio Midas's Undead Spirit" thing went right over everyone's heads; it had simply been too long ago that Stuart had recited his "Mercutio introduction" speech (all the way back in adventure 20, "Prism Keep"), so I had to prompt them what that was all about. Oh well, that's what happens when you only game every 4-6 weeks, and the DM pulls up something from literally years ago. I'd say "lesson learned," but that's a lesson I've had the opportunity to learn many times before in the past, and if hasn't sunk in yet, who am I to try to make it do so now?

And finally, I should point out that when the time came for the Prime Fool to do his little song and dance routine, I had Joey turn off the music we were playing in the background, scooted the kitchen table over a bit so I'd have room to squeeze in behind everyone, and sang the song from memory as I danced and capered around the seated players. Joey found the performance so unexpected and funny that he literally fell off of his chair and was holding his sides as he lay on his back on the kitchen floor, helplessly laughing; I had to step over him as I made my first circuit around the table.

My players are real troopers (as anyone who has ever heard me try to sing can attest).

And with this write-up, I am now officially caught up to where we are in the campaign. Fortunately, we game this afternoon; if we manage to finish up the adventure this session I should have something to post next week. If not...see you all in a month or so!

ADVENTURE 69 - STONE OF THE FLESHWARPERS

PC Roster:
NPC Roster:
Well, this is a bummer. We played through the first part of this adventure back in early May, and I had hoped we'd be finishing it off tomorrow, but I found out yesterday that our next gaming session won't be until 22 June. So, rather than wait another three weeks before finishing this adventure and then tacking the ending onto what I have written thus far, I think I'll post what I have now and then after we finish it up, I can come back and write up the conclusion.

- - -

Akari, Feron, Galrich, Rale, Thunderwolf, and Aerik filed into the Guild briefing room. Guildmaster Farthingale sat at the head of the table, his regal bearing somewhat offset by the presence of Quiffington, the duckbunny with a blended amalgamation of the minds of four different wild mages, who perched on the table on his four webbed feet at Farthingale's left. Also present on the table and nibbling on a small piece of cheese was Abercrombie, the human-headed rat and former aberrant familiar of Percival Alabaster Strangeway of the now-defunct Cult of the Far Realm.

"Thank you all for coming," intoned Farthingale, bringing the odd meeting to order. "We have...amassed a rather odd collection of individuals in recent months. Besides these two here, we now also have a large goat with four human and half-elf heads grafted to its side. The Guild has been taking care of them until we could find some way to permanently cure them of their various, uh, ailments.

"As you know, the Guild has tried on numerous occasions to polymorph them back into their human forms, but that has never been a permanent solution, for the wild magic surge and Far Realm magic responsible for their respective transformations has slowly, over time, always returned them back to their current forms. However, the Guild sages, with assistance from the Order of Boccob, have recently unearthed a historical text that might hold the key to restoring them permanently. It seems there was a civilization, now long since fallen, in the southern continent of Hepmonaland built around gladiatorial combat between captured slaves and an assortment of fantastic creatures. These combats were seen as sacrifices to their strange gods. One arena/temple in particular was renowned for the wide variety of strange creatures used in their combat arena; the texts state that the creatures used in the arena were often hybrid creatures magically crafted from the existing local fauna and altered into all sorts of odd forms. The key to these magical transformations was a magical gem called the 'stone of the fleshwarpers' that had fallen from the sky, which provided the power needed to permanently alter a given form.

"I believe if your group can find this stone of the fleshwarpers and return it here to Greyhawk City, our Guild wizards should be able to permanently restore Quiffington, Abercrombie, and the four spellcasters whose heads are grafted to the goat's side. I have made arrangements to send you through the teleport circle downstairs to the Thunder Bay Adventurers Guild in the southern continent. Quiffington and Abercrombie have elected to travel with you; the goat will remain behind. Does anyone have any questions?"

No one did; the quest seemed simple enough. Before too long, the adventurers and their formerly-human allies (along with Felix, Feron's eagle animal companion, and Fang, Galrich's trained dire wolf) were stepping through the teleport circle in the basement of the Adventurers Guild Headquarters and stepping out of a similar structure a continent away. They were met by a grizzled fighter wearing leather armor, with a sword strapped to his hip.

"Well, well," sneered the fighter, looking over the Wing Three adventurers. "Looks like it's them fancy adventurin'-type folks from Greyhawk City, come here to show all us poor folk just exactly how this heroing business is supposed to be done! I'm Palimar, the Guildmaster 'round these parts, and forgive me if I don't fawn all over you. C'mon, this way," he said, and turned on his heel, walking outside into the open air of the wooden fortress that kept the jungle at bay. He didn't bother to see if the Wing Three adventurers were following, and his attitude suggested he didn't particularly care.

"I've got your transportation ready," Palimar said. "That fat piece of pork Farthingale gave us a copy of the map showing where you wanna go, and I doubt you'd make it that far on foot, so I arranged you some accommodations better suited to your level of roughness. All you have to do is sit down, make yourselves all comfy and cozy, and maybe look out the window if you wanna. I imagine that's a bit more your speed, anyway." And with that, Palimar turned away again and headed over to a large clearing, where sat an odd-looking wooden structure, looking somewhat like an oversized picnic basket with a door in the back. Off to one side, a small group of kids were amusing themselves playing at swordfights with sticks.

"Hey, Sky-Captain!" called out the Guildmaster. "Your self-loading cargo is here!"

One of the "kids" broke off from the others, to cries of "Aw, c'mon, Tamble!" Tamble "Sky-Captain" Paddiwack approached the group; she was a female gnome clad in leather armor, with a pair of goggles pushed up on top of her head. She appeared much more friendly and outgoing than Palimar, and welcomed the Wing Three adventurers to the southern continent. After asking them if they were ready to go, she opened the door in the rear of the wooden construction. Inside were two benches, room enough to seat six humans reasonably comfortably, with a shelf above each bench to stow small items. (Feron, still creeped out by the appearance of Abercrombie, insisted that he and Quiffington spend the trip on the shelves above their heads rather than on their laps - which had been Abercrombie's stated preference.) Tamble said the trip should be about five hours. She was familiar with the ruin they sought, calling it "the Teardrop Serpent," although she'd never landed there.

Once everyone was settled, Tamble whistled for her trained roc, which flew down and perched on the "handle" of the oversized "picnic basket." The little gnome scrambled up on top of the wooden box, then climbed up onto the back of the roc's neck. "Off we go!" she called, and with a jolt the roc took to the air, the wooden compartment containing the adventurers gripped in a pair of massive talons.

The first four hours of the flight went fairly well, although Fang's presence ensured a tight fit in the compartment. The group saw the jungle passing by below them through the narrow, horizontal openings that served as windows on all four sides of the roc-borne craft as they streaked through the sky.

Suddenly, the whole capsule jostled from side to side, as if the roc were dodging and weaving. There was a sudden gnomish curse, followed by the sounds of a wand being activated. The heroes scrambled to the window-slits, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of what was happening above, but the angles were all wrong. Akari took matters into his own hands by opening the door in the rear of the craft and jumping out. Feron stifled a scream once she remembered the tiefling paladin wore a ring of feather falling, and would not be plummeting immediately to his death. Indeed, as he leapt from the craft he mentally summoned his griffon riding mount Tsukitora from his home in the Beastlands, and the snow-white beast manifested in the air, saw his master slowly falling from the sky, and maneuvered himself below the paladin, catching him on his broad back. Then Akari flew Tsukitora back over to the roc, while inside the craft, Rale was tying the end of a rope to the wooden slat between two window-slits so they'd all have something to hold on to, and Thunderwolf frantically grabbed for the door and slammed it back shut.

Rising up to the level of the roc, Akari and Tsukitora could see what the problem was - two winged constrictor snakes had flown up from the jungle below and attacked Tamble and the roc. One had bitten the roc in the throat and had wrapped its sinuous body around the great bird's neck, slowly choking it to death; as Akari watched, its talons unclenched and the wooden capsule suddenly plummeted.

Inside the capsule, the adventurers and their animal (and monstrosity) companions rose up from their seats as they experienced a few frightening moments of freefall. Suddenly, Tamble's disembodied head appeared in the front of the capsule and began speaking, courtesy of a preprogrammed illusion spell. "We seem to be in free fall," she commented quite pleasantly to the group. Just as suddenly, the fall stopped in mid-air, sending everyone sprawling on the floor in a tangle of limbs. Feron was aghast to see that Abercrombie had fallen onto her chest and was burying himself in fear in her hair. "Not to worry, though," continued Tamble’s illusory, disembodied head, "as a feather fall spell should be kicking in at any moment."

"Timely," grumbled Rale.

In the meantime, the second feathered serpent had gotten a grip on Tamble, knocked her from her perch, and was wrapping her up in its coils. Akari, seeing that the craft seemed to have stopped its rapid descent to the ground below, wheeled Tsukitora around to pursue the gnome. Inside the slowly-falling craft, Feron disentangled herself from the rat-thing and wildshaped into a Large air elemental, exiting via a window-crack and flying over to see if she could aid the roc - who was, after all, their way back to Thunder Bay. By the time she made it to the roc, though, it had lost consciousness and began plummeting to the ground below, following the craft it had dropped but at a much faster rate of speed.

Still, of the two, the craft hit first. Fortunately, it splashed down in the middle of a fast-moving river, at which time Tamble's illusory head announced perkily, "We appear to have hit water. Please wait as the craft reconfigures itself for water travel." A control lever silently rose up from the floor. "If one of you would like to steer, a rudder is unfolding from the bottom of the craft," suggested Tamble’s floating head. Rale and Galrich were at the front of the craft where the control lever had risen; the rogue grabbed it first, deciding he liked his chances better if he were piloting the vessel rather than the impulsive half-orc. Watching the rapids ahead, he swerved the craft around two upthrust rocks in rapid succession, but was unable to avoid hitting a third; the vessel crashed against the rock and swerved sideways before being carried along by the fast currents. Unseen behind them, the roc splashed into the river some ways behind them and began shadowing the craft it once carried. Feron had caught up by this point and battered the serpent still wrapped around the great bird's neck with her elemental fists, but while she eventually convinced the creature to untangle itself from the roc and swim away to save itself, she was too late for the roc, who had suffocated under the snake's constricting attack.

Fortunately, Akari and Tsukitora had had better luck in rescuing Tamble. The griffon had flown up behind the winged constrictor and gotten its tail in his sharp beak, and the serpent eventually decided to release the gnome in order to better fight off the creature attempting to bite it in half. Tamble, released, plummeted a few short feet before her own ring of feather falling kicked in; no doubt she wore the ring for the same reason Akari did - it was practically a necessity when riding an aerial steed. After Tsukitora and Akari finished off the snake, they flew over to the gnome and Akari plucked her out of the sky. She was unconscious, and looked to have some broken ribs, but she was still breathing. Akari used his lay on hands ability to heal her ribs, and she breathed easier after that, although she remained unconscious. Akari opted to let her sleep.

Down below, though, things weren't quite so pleasant. Water was spraying into the craft from the window-slits, and the door wasn't entirely water-tight, so there was an inch or two of water on the floor as Rale desperately tried steering the craft back to a forward-facing configuration as it was borne sideways down the winding river's path. He'd probably have eventually gotten it, too - had it not been for the waterfall. The craft tipped over the side of the waterfall, knocking everyone still on board over to one of the walls as the vessel did a 90-degree rotation. Of course, it didn't get to fall too much in this orientation before the feather fall effect kicked back in, so the group once again found themselves piled on top of each other, only this time with water from the rushing waterfall sluicing in from the window-slits, which were now at the craft's new "roof." When it hit the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, water spilled up from the window-slits at the "floor" and the craft sank slowly sideways.

"Everybody out!" called Rale from the vessel's original front. Thunderwolf and Aerik, at the vessel's original back, got the door open, and they started exiting when they found their next source of trouble: a giant crocodile swam in this pool, and was somewhat intrigued at the sight of a meal being delivered to it. It swam over to the vessel's open door and snapped at anyone attempting to exit.

Galrich wasn't about to let anyone else horn in on the first opportunity he'd had this whole trip to actually do something; he pushed his way to the door and stabbed at the crocodile with his greatsword. Aerik attempted to do the same, but dwarves aren't particularly buoyant swimmers at the best of times, and even less so when burdened with heavy armor; he sank like a stone and had to scramble over to the edge of the pool, climbing up onto the bank. Felix grabbed up a frightened Abercrombie and exited the craft, his powerful wings pulling him through the water until he hit the surface and could become airborne; Abercrombie's frantic cries were heard all the way to shore. Fang and Quiffington exited the door in the safety that came from being behind Thunderwolf and Galrich, who were busy fighting off the giant crocodile, and Rale thought that looked like a particularly safe route and quickly followed suit. The two sword-wielding adventurers soon finished off the hungry reptile, and made it back up to the surface, where they greedily gasped lungfuls of fresh air - and heard Feron's frantic cries for everyone to get out of the way, quickly!

Because right then, the roc's corpse tumbled over the edge of the waterfall and came crashing down upon the submerged vessel. A massive wing slammed into Galrich and sent him sprawling back into the water, while the roc's body broke the foundering craft into splinters. "There goes our way home," lamented Rale from the safety of the pool's edge.

Still, as things went, they weren't faring too badly. Everyone gathered back together, and Akari healed Tamble enough to wake her and brief her on what all had transpired. She was saddened at the loss of her roc, but grateful to have been saved from the coils of the winged serpent. She agreed to help get the group to the Teardrop Serpent, but had no intentions of exploring its inner contents. She showed them where they were on the map, and estimated it was another hour's flight away, or several days on foot. A new plan was hastily made; Feron resumed her normal form and removed the Daern's dollhouse from her pack. Rale, Thunderwolf, Galrich, Aerik, Fang, Abercrombie, and Quiffington went inside, then Feron packed it away again, put the magical haversack back on her own back, and wildshaped into an eagle. Tamble and Akari mounted Tsukitora, while eagle-Feron and Felix took to the air and followed the white griffon as Akari led it to the Teardrop Serpent as per Tamble's directions.

Roughly an hour later, the Teardrop Serpent came into view. It was in a small clearing in the jungle, and its name was very apparent, for it was indeed carved in the shape of a teardrop, with a mosaic of a snake eating its own tail carved into the structure's top surface. Dropping to the ground near the "point" of the teardrop shape, Akari and Tamble dismounted from Tsukitora while Feron and Felix landed nearby. There was a smaller structure near the Teardrop, a small stone pillar some 8 feet tall and 5 feet wide, with a rounded top and a series of serpents carved in bas-relief on all sides. Unseen by the group, the tip of a blowgun extended through a hole between several of the carved serpents, and a poison-tipped dart was shot into Tsukitora's side. The griffon yelped and reared back; Akari moved forward to examine the structure and was shot by a dart himself, although it lodged in his tabard and didn't pierce through his armor. Then a series of calls came from inside the structure, a deep blaring like that of a horn of some type.

Feron resumed her half-elven form and unpacked the Daern's dollhouse, allowing the rest of the group to exit (except for Quiffington and Abercrombie, who remained inside, and Tamble took the opportunity to enter the magical habitation herself to rest up after her near-death experience). The adventurers crowded around the structure, trying to peer inside it. Seeing as how the poison darts weren't having the desired effects, the creature inside the hollow structure tried a different tactic: it reached its hands through the stone, grabbed up Akari, and tried slamming him into the stone. Unfortunately, the scaled hands had only gotten purchase on his cloak, and instead of crashing his face into the stone structure the creature inside only managed to tug on Akari's cloak a bit, to no effect.

However, the fact that there was no apparent door in the structure to allow a pair of arms to extend through got Akari wondering if the whole thing was an illusion of some sort. He stood there, concentrating on trying to see through this illusion, to no effect. Then Feron, tired of the whole ordeal, summoned a Huge earth elemental to pick the whole structure up and toss it aside. Revealed within was an ophidian, a snake-man with short, stumpy legs who wielded a curved blade as well as a blowgun. He tried brandishing his weapon at Akari, but was slammed to death by the earth elemental before he got to land a solid blow himself.

By that time, Galrich and Rale had started climbing the Teardrop Serpent structure, for the "point" of the teardrop, and the edges on either side, formed a ramp of sorts leading up to the top of the 20-foot-tall "ring" part of the building. Halfway up, there was a commotion from the jungle's edge directly across the structure, and a small band of eight lizardfolk fighters entered the clearing, javelins and clubs ready for action. Feron reacted by calling up a wall of fire directly across the majority of the line of lizardfolk; they hissed in pain and dropped back, making their way around the vertical sheet of flames. But Feron sent her Huge earth elemental to meet them, and then conjured up another one for good measure. Thunderwolf and Fang climbed up the sloping ramp, and while the young fighter used his higher ground to shoot arrows down at the approaching lizardfolk as they approached the Teardrop Serpent, Galrich and Fang used the ramp as a means of getting in a good charge as they leaped down upon their foes. Fang killed his foe immediately and started eating the slain lizardfolk; Galrich cut his in half with his sword but opted not to stop for a snack. The earth elementals finished up the remaining lizardfolk as they made their way from behind the wall of fire.

In the meantime, Akari had also climbed up to the top of the Teardrop Serpent, and was examining the twenty evenly-spaced pillars rising up from the top of the ring of the temple/arena, when up from the arena's center flew a medusa. The fact that this medusa had popped up out of nowhere and was flying wasn't the most unusual thing about her; rather, it was the fact that she shot rays from several of the serpents that grew from her scalp. Several hit Akari with no effect. One of them hit Galrich as he climbed back up the slope to the top of the ring, and he suddenly became enraged at the realization that Akari had killed his puppy, his one and only true friend, Akari not only killed his puppy but then he laughed about it, and Galrich hated Akari like he had never hated anyone before in his life, and wanted him dead! Fortunately, Akari saw the sudden transformation on Galrich's face - the half-orc would never be a good poker player under the best of conditions - and the newly-minted tiefling paladin had the sense of mind to cast a magic circle against evil spell upon himself, which shielded Galrich from mental control as long as he was in close enough proximity to Akari. Galrich suddenly realized that the only puppy he had ever had in his entire life was Fang, who was busy chowing down on dead lizardfolk at the bottom of the temple/arena, and Akari had never harmed Fang, and dammit, who's been playing around with my mind again? The medusa? Lemme at her!

The medusa was slain by a combination of Tsukitora's claw and bite attacks (for the griffon had flown up to meet this aerial foe who was attacking his master) and a grab-and-smash from one of the earth elementals, who had used its innate earth glide ability to walk through the Teardrop Serpent, as it was made of individual stones fitted together so perfectly as to give the appearance of having been carved in a single piece. Still, there was little respite, for almost immediately a four-headed hydra appeared in the middle of the arena. Surprisingly, instead of rushing forward and snapping with its jaws or spitting a breath weapon of some sort at its enemies, it cast a chain lightning spell at Tsukitora, branching off to also hit Aerik, Akari, Galrich, and the earth elemental there in the arena with it. That went so well the hydra did the same thing again almost immediately, and followed it up with a cone of cold and a spell resistence spell. To the adventurers' chagrin, they realized that not only was this hydra a spellcaster, each of its heads could cast a spell independently of the others!

The nagahydra gave the Wing Three heroes the toughest fight of their lives to that point. A second round of a quartet of spells all at once left Aerik dying on the arena sands and Akari staggering on his feet, about to slip into unconsciousness himself; only the fact that one of the nagahydra's heads was more into defense than offense (opting to cast a protection from energy spell on itself rather than another chain lightning or cone of cold, like its head-brothers had done) kept Aerik and Akari from dying right then and there. Akari staggered over to Aerik's crumpled body and channeled his remaining healing energy into the dwarf's body via his laying on hands, while Feron's casting of a mass cure moderate wounds probably saved the tiefling's life. In the meantime, Galrich leaped from the top of the temple/arena onto the second earth elemental's shoulder, and from there to the sand of the arena, and continued his charge at ground level, tearing into the nagahydra with his greatsword. Thunderwolf pelted it with arrows from the rooftop, and it was actually one of his arrows that finished off the powerful beast.

But by that time, there was another combatant in the ring. This was a triceratops, unique from all of the others of its kind in that it shot scorching rays from its two longest horns. Nobody saw where it had come from; one moment it wasn't there and the next it was, almost as if it had sprung forth from the very sands of the arena itself.

- - -

That's as far as we got. Akari is down to 4 hit points with all of his lay on hands ability used up, and he's seriously considering binking back to Guild Headquarters as his very first action next gaming session. That'll be a first for this campaign: I don't think Telgrane's ever had to bink in to replace Akari before; usually, it flows in the opposite direction. (Of course, Akari used to be much higher level than Telgrane; now Akari's a 16th-level paladin and Telgrane's a 15th-level conjurer, so even with Akari's +1 Level Adjustment for his tiefling status, they're not as far apart as they used to be.)

To "record the scene" for the next session, I did the following: I put a rubber band around my initiative deck, and it will remain untouched until we play again, so I'll know exactly who's taking their actions next. Since I used a paper geomorph (the back of an entire sheet from a desk calendar, upon which the Teardrop Serpent is drawn over my 1"-square grid), I lightly penciled in the locations of each of the PCs and their various allies and enemies, so I'll be able to "rebuild the board" the way we left it. I have a PC tracking sheet which I print off each session; for the next one, I'll just continue using the one I started for this session, which has the PCs' current hit point levels, which spell slots have been expended, and notes as to which spells are active. (For the record, Akari has a magic circle vs. evil active, which will disappear if he binks away - I hope Logan's taking that into account. Feron has a stoneskin active, and Rale's gulped down a vial of antitoxin as a preventive measure.)

Hopefully nothing will change in the meantime, and we'll be able to keep our 22 June session on the books!