Story HourPost your ongoing tales from your campaigns, and read those from others for inspiration. Lots of other RPG boards post "Story Hours", but this is where it started!
After completing Keep on the Shadowfell, instead of jumping straight into Thunderspire Labyrinth, I wanted to run an old 1e/2e adventure called Tallow’s Deep from Dungeon magazine #18, written by Steve Gilbert and Bill Slavicsek. I originally played this with my brother and a friend (and a DM-NPC named Ash) around 1989, and it has always cemented itself in our minds as a classic scenario. It introduced me to 3-D dungeon design, crafty goblinoid tactics and devious traps, all of which combined to create a truly fearsome – and mildly frustrating - scenario.
All those years ago, this adventure was run without miniatures, maps and markers, and looking back, I can hardly remember how we did it. I suppose we did have graph paper, pencils and our imaginations, which were obviously more than enough! But I wanted to update it to 4e mechanics and pacing, and now that we’re done, I can say that it adapted very well. I changed a few elements around, adding some and detracting others, but the core adventure of Tallow’s Deep remains the same, a deadly romp through a trapped goblin warren where, as the tagline says:
“In the goblin’s mine, adventurers get the shaft.”
I hope you enjoy reading these recaps. I had a lot of fun writing them. And as always, thanks to the players for making it all happen in unpredictable ways.
Nebulous
ADVENTURE NOTES
This mini-campaign actually kicks off with a character from Keep on the Shadowfell, Douvan Stahl the Ranger. He was an NPC in KotS that we elevated to PC status and ran in a 3-part Side Trek that paralleled the events in KotS. In part two of that Side Trek, Douvan has returned to Silverymoon to procure payment from his employer, one wily halfling businessman known as Merple the Moneylender. But not everything goes as planned when Douvan arrives. If you read the KotS storyhour then this first installment will be familiar, but it introduces some necessary characters and the rest of the campaign branches off from here. Tallow’s Deep is bookended with a completely new story that has the module sandwiched in the middle.
The 4e conversion of Tallow’s Deep took far, far longer than the original ever did, mostly due to expanded encounter format and combat. But it was no less fun, and probably even more so.
I should also note that one player, whose 4e character is Jolen, the Cleric of Tempus, was an original player in the 1989 Tallow’s Deep. He did not know he would be returning there because I never mentioned it until the session they actually arrive, which was adventure #3. His first character EVER in D&D also died in the final encounter of Tallow’s Deep, so we were very curious to see what happened to his newest incarnation…
Douvan Stahl scratched at his prickly beard. It irked him this morning, but he wasn’t going to shave. No, in fact he had been thinking about growing it out like his father’s beard, a great bushy thing that even a dwarf would admire. But he had to get past the damn itching first.
He and Merric had just arrived in town where they had a strange encounter with the Griffon Guard. See, he and the halfling had found a strange mirror buried in the muddy graveyard of a dead dragon outside of Winterhaven, and for reasons he did not quite understand, the Griffon Guard wasn’t keen on this item entering city limits. So they took it. Regardless, Douvan wasn’t terribly worried. Merple would still pay him for the information they learned in Winterhaven, with or without the mirror.
Merric parted ways with him and Douvan continued alone, admiring the city around him. Douvan loved Silverymoon. He loved the elvish architecture of soft, curving lines and the organic transition from homes to gardens to businesses and back to gardens. It was Mirtul now and flowers were starting to bloom; rich yellowfiddles from Sembia and fragrant violet roses supposedly imported from Evermeet long ago. He stood on one of many small bridges criscrossing Silverymoon, drawing a few deep breaths of fragrant morning air. The sun had just crested the city skyline, bathing the world in brilliant shades of red and orange.
He stopped by an eatery, threw down a few coppers and grabbed a slice of bread and cheese, and munching on breakfast, he kept walking, trying to remember exactly how to reach to Merple’s place of business without getting lost…
[GM Note: This particular session was a solo adventure. The other characters will make their appearances in Adventure #2: Merple’s Mission (except for Raven the Druid, who does not show up until much later].
It is another glorious dawn in Silverymoon, Jewel of the North, as the sun rises in a vermillion blaze, casting long shadows across the ground and spire-like turrets of the city. The whisper of commerce begins early, and into this rising whisper walks the ranger Douvan Stahl.
He finds himself winding through the convoluted streets of Silverymoon while trying to reach his employer, one Merple the Moneylender. Silverymoon is a unique place where the various races all live in harmony, and he enjoys his stroll down tranquil neighborhoods decorated with bright flowers and exotic trees brought from all across Faerun.
He eventually leaves the residential area and reaches Diagon Alley, an place he would not normally visit. Spellcasters of all sorts make their living here, and he passes more than one shop housing bizarre items behind the glass; various stuffed imps with lolling red eyes and urns puffing smelly colored smoke; floating baubles spinning around mannequin heads and rows of twiggy broomsticks designated as:
“ON SALE! TODAY ONLY!”
[GM Note: I was reading Harry Potter at the time I wrote this, so some of the details leaked over]
He finally reaches the unadorned door of Merple the Moneylender and raps the appropriate amount of times. A squeaky voice announces: “Enter!” The door swings open of its own accord and Douvan steps in. The place is the same as he remembers, small but cozy, a roaring iron furnace on the wall, a few shallow steps leading down to a den lined with bookshelves. Merple sits in a chair behind a desk cluttered with pens, quills and a fat ledger book. There’s a new item though- a large square cage draped by a blue cloth.
“Douvan!” he cries. “Good to see you again! How did you fare in Winterhaven? Find anything interesting?”
Douvan starts at the beginning and tells him the whole story; the trapped bridge, the flooded excavation site, the dozens of kobolds, the human helping them, the bones and the mirror and the bugbears and Valthrun and the Shadowfell and the Griffon Guard taking the mirror. Merple’s face changes during the story from extreme joy at the beginning, to glum disappointment by the end.
“They took it, eh? Sad, sad, sad news that is. Very sad to hear. It sounded like a most exquisite artifact! Worth a coin or two, I’m sure, I’m sure. I hate to say this, but it is unlikely they will return it, Douvan.”
The ranger is aware of this too, but doesn’t dwell on the news. He steps closer to the cage and is jolted when a pink tongue whips out.
“CROOOAK.” There is a huge toad inside.
“Oh, don’t mind him. That’s Toady, a rare speckled specimen from the Evermoors. Should make short work of the nasty rodents around here. He’s quite nice, actually. I’m fond of him.” Douvan takes his word for it.
As promised, Merple pays his half of the fee for finding the Tomb of Blacksoul and determining that there is nothing there left to salvage. He insists though in paying Merric in person. Merple makes a few notes in his fat ledger book, emphatically dots the entry with his pen, and closes the book.
“Well,” says Merple, “with that done, are you interested in a new job? I always have several pots brewing on the stove. For instance—”
But Merple is interrupted by heavy pounding on the door. The pattern of knocks is very specific. He presses his lips together into a thin line. “Oh my. Oh my oh my oh my. He’s early. Very early.”
Merple is flustered and stands up, wringing his hands. Douvan is confused. “Not good, no no no. Not good at all. Douvan, you must leave. Wait! No! He mustn’t see you leaving, no no no. Hide in the closet here. Wait! No! He’ll look there. Oh my oh my oh my, dear dear dear dear…” Merple pushes Douvan toward the cage. “Go in there with Toady. Don’t worry, he’s very gentle! Just be quiet and don’t say a word. Zip! Zip!” Merple makes a pinching motion across his lips.
Douvan stares at the dark cage with the big toad inside. He doesn’t like the sound of this, but Merple is clearly upset. “Are you sure, Merp—”
“Yes! Yes! Just go!” he hisses. “And quietly!” To the door he shouts: “Coming! Just a wee moment!”
Douvan is bustled into the cage with the wet, spotted amphibian, and a tongue lashes out to lick his arm. Or taste him, he isn’t sure which. There is not much room and Douvan maneuvers to the back, hunching down for as much cover as possible and peeking out through the dark fabric draped over the cage. Merple has returned to his chair, pressing down the lapels of his coat, and then announces: “Ah…enter!”
The front door creaks open. A shaft of light spills down the steps, a shadow elongated upon the threshold. From his position, Douvan cannot see who it is. Footsteps slowly click into the room, and then the door closes.
“Balthazar!” says Merple with forced sincerity. “A pleasure to see you so soon, a pleasure indeed. How…ahem…how can I help you today?”
A man says, “Help me, Merple? I believe you have helped me enough already.” The voice drips with sarcasm. Douvan shifts for a better angle, peeking out into the room. A man clad in black robes with red trim and a pointed hat has stopped in front of Merple’s desk. Draped around his neck is a hissing maroon pseudodragon, its yellow eyes glaring all directions.
Douvan’s stomach lurches. This man is obviously a wizard with his familiar, and he does not look happy.
“What seems to be the problem, Balthazar?” asks Merple. “Perhaps we can work out—”
“The problem, my squat Halfling, has to do with a bag of powdered unicorn hoof you sold me. The PROBLEM, my dear, conniving, treacherous little half-man, is that you sold me powdered mule’s hoof instead!”
The pseudodragon spits and hisses, flapping its wings. Merple pales. “It’s not true!” he wails, his voice squeakier than ever. “It’s not true, Balthazar! I didn’t know! I didn’t know!”
“It’s your job to know,” growls the wizard, producing a long, thin maple wand from the depths of his robe. The pseudodragon leaps from his shoulder and flaps to the floor, sniffing. “Do you think that Balthazar of the Potion Emporium wouldn’t notice that kind of trick in my magical workings? Do you even comprehend the sort of unwanted side effects that arise from daring to ADD a mule’s foot? DO YOU? Or course not!” Merple falls to his knees, begging and pleading.
Douvan pushes the fat toad aside, wondering what in the Nine Hells he has gotten himself into. Toady pushes back some, feeling equally cramped in the cage. Douvan is knocked into a latch he had not seen previously. There seems to be a secondary door on the back of the cage that is flush to the stone wall. He peeks out the curtain again. The pseudodragon is closer, sniffing and snarling.
“It was an honest mistake!” shrieks Merple. “Please believe me, Balthazar! It won’t happen again, I swear!”
“Oh, I know it won’t,” the wizard says airily. “Not for the next day at least. After that, I expect you to be on your best behavior, Merple.”
The tip of the wand begins to glow blue. Merple’s face is bathed in its light. “What are you going to do?” he whispers in abject terror.
The wizard’s smile is not pleasant. “Teach you a lesson.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes. I DO.”
A thin beam of light streaks out, enveloping Merple and followed by a puff of acrid smoke. He screams once, but when the smoke clears Merple is no longer there, replaced by a large squat frog, a pair of oversized glasses dangling awkwardly from its face.
Merple-Frog croaks and hops away, while Balthazar cannot help but to laugh. He puts the wand away, circles around to the ledger book and begins flipping through it, still chuckling. Douvan is appalled, and not more than a little terrified! He shrinks back into the cage, but the pseudodragon familiar is curious about Toady and the shadow lurking behind it. It has moved closer than ever, ruffling its wings and squawking a warning to its master.
Balthazar looks up from the ledger. “What is it? Oh my, yes. Look, Merple! You have a friend here! One of the few you’ll probably ever make. Wretch.”
Balthazar walks closer to the draped cage. His eyes narrow. “Is someone…in there?”
Icy cold fear fills Douvan’s gut. He nearly springs out of the cage, using the toad as a shield and bolting for the door, but doubts his chances. The wizard’s wand is out again. Douvan brushes the backdoor latch, and this time in the subsequent glow from the wand he sees the outline of a trapdoor in the wall outside the cage. The cage is pressed flush against it. Douvan does not waste another second. He pushes the toad out of the way, jerks the small cage door open, and presses on the stone outline. There is a quiet click as a secret panel opens.
“WHO IS THERE?” bellows the magician. “SHOOOOOOOW YOURSELF!”
The front door of the cage magically jerks open and Toady wriggles out, just about the same time as Douvan has squeezed himself into a passage obviously made to accommodate a halfling and not a human. He tries to close the secret door just as the red pseudodragon darts into the cage. Douvan succeeds, and then shuffles on his elbows through a narrow dank tunnel, but soon bumps his head on a stone wall. Beneath his fingers he feels a wooden trapdoor with a metal ring. He pulls up, feels space yawning beneath him and an unpleasant stink. He doesn’t have time to ponder the destination. The secret passage is opening behind him. His fingers scramble for a dilapidated wooden ladder, and then Douvan is moving down, down, down into darkness, his boots scuffing on wood and stone, his heart hammering in his chest. Blue light fills the tunnel above him and he hears the throaty rasp of the pseudodragon. He hears running water and the strong smell of a sewer, and soon Douvan’s feet touch on a cold stone floor. Far above him the blue light winks out, and then he hears doors slamming.
He’s trapped down here. Wherever “here” is. He can’t see a thing in the pitch blackness.
He’s not terribly worried yet. He did not descend far; he’s surely in the upper level of Silverymoon’s sewer system, which is well maintained by sweepers and ratters. His keen directional sense gives him an idea of which way to go, and he knows that the aqueducts empty to the east. Plus, he has several sunrods that will light the way if all else fails, but he doesn’t want to use them quite yet. Too much light. Feeling along the wet, slick walls, Douvan eventually finds a torch sconce and half a torch. He lights it with tindertwigs and looks around him in the wan illumination. He’s on the cusp of a sluggish, stinking channel, bobbing with all sorts of glistening, unsavory things.
Douvan starts walking toward what he hopes is an exit.
The debacle upstairs worries him though. Merple has never wronged Douvan, not that he’s aware, and his punishment at the hands of the mage seems unduly cruel. Transmogrification or Polymorph, whatever they call it, also seems illegal. Douvan starts to wonder if there is a way to blackmail the wizard, and then he has second thoughts about that as well. He’ll need to speak with Merric first. One must never be careless with a wizard.
Half an hour later Douvan stops cold when he hears a new sound over the swish of dirty water – a rhythmic flapping like a wet leather sheet, and it is moving closer. He pulls his sword and waits, unable to see anything down the dingy tunnel more than twenty feet or so, listening to something draw nearer, and nearer, and nearer, and THEN—
Something bulbous, pink and veined explodes around a corner at high speed! It careens off a wall and whips past him, darkness swallowing it within seconds, coming and going so fast that Douvan barely caught a glimpse. His heart rate finally starts to slow, and he thinks back on what he knows about creatures in the sewer system. It must have been a sludge bat, a relatively harmless if disgusting denizen of the region.
He continues, eventually reaching a junction blocked by slick green slime dripping from the ceiling. He can possibly leap to the far side but would rather not risk it. Untold diseases lurk in the water. Douvan hunches down and waits, anticipating some flotsam and jetsam to float by eventually, maybe something that will support his weight so he can vault across.
He hasn’t been waiting long when he hears voices in the distance.
Douvan slowly grinds out his torch and retreats a short ways, watching torchlight approach from a tunnel across the watery channel.
“I’m hungry,” a voice rasps. “Where’d that sludge bat go?”
“I dunno,” says another. “Shut up.”
Douvan also hears rats squeaking, and a few moments later several unsavory characters enter his sight. They’re ratmen, almost surely the lycanthrope kind, with elongated noses and twitching whiskers. They’re armed with shortswords, and the foremost wererat carries a torch. A few filthy rats scurry around their feet.
Douvan presses his back against the wall, cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. They’re heading his way, and their vision is much, much keener than his own. This is also their element, and he’s not sure if he can take on two of them at once. Separately perhaps, yes, but both? They’re filthy, cruel little monsters, and he is sorry that he encountered them. Worse, as lycanthropes, he lacks a silver weapon to make the wererats truly howl in pain. This won’t be easy.
The wererats push open a moldy door and root around inside, then exit again and stand at the lip of the channel. “We’ll jump,” one of them says. “Stand back, need room.”
Douvan sees his chance. He unslings his bow, peeking around the corner from cover. The ratman has backed up, testing his footing, and then sprints forward, gaining momentum to leap over the gap. Douvan readies to fire just as the wererat is about to leave his platform. The arrow catches him square in the chest. It shrieks in midair, floundering, hits the corner of the far walkway and flops into the water. It rises, sputtering and choking and squealing as the current carries it down the tunnel.
“Meazel! HELP!”
The other wererat follows, extending a hand to pull him out. Smiling, Douvan shoulders his bow and backtracks until he finds a hidden storage room. Inside he finds some old mops, one of which is sturdy enough to use as a pole. Praying for the luck of Tymora, he prods the bottom of the stinking channel, and then hurls himself across. He thuds to the other side, safe and sound, and keeps walking. He soon finds a new door, but it is swollen in the frame. He rams a shoulder into it, bounces off, and then tries a better plan.
Skullthumper.
He takes the maul out and starts hitting the door. Cracks appear, spreading wider and wider, and soon he has battered the door down. He steps inside a disgusting room filled with rotting bags of grain covered with tiny black insects. There is a cracked barrel that he rolls in front of the door, and then he takes some time to reapply the pitch to his torch. There is only enough fuel left for a few minutes, but he still has the sunrods. Unfortunately, the sunrods will draw the attention of anything nearby long before Douvan sees it approaching.
He finds a second door, but there is only wrecked equipment beyond it. Then he sees the ladder.
The same sort of ladder that led him down here to begin with. He has just started climbing up rungs when he hears footsteps approaching! Outside the ravaged door he sees the wobble of torchlight. Fearing that is the wererats again, he climbs the ladder double haste, pushes through a lid at the top and finds himself in a narrow drainage tunnel flooded by a beautiful thing—
SUNLIGHT!
There is an iron grill above his head, but once he laces his fingers through it Douvan finds that the grill is firmly secured. He hears wagons outside rolling across flagstone streets and the neigh of horses. He sees legs walking by, so he’s probably standing in a drainage tunnel on a main thoroughfare.
“Hey! Someone help me!” he calls out. He’s ignored for the most part, and then he hears sounds from below. At least one person has entered the room beneath him.
“Is anybody there? I need out of here! Help!”
Finally, a pair of immaculate shoes stops beside the grate. The face is unseen because of the dazzling corona of the sun behind the man’s head.
“What are you doing in the drain?” asks the man. Douvan is VERY disappointed to find that the man’s voice is familiar.
“Ah…please…ah…please help me out,” he says lamely.
The other man is quiet for a moment, and then with an exasperated huff, mutters, “Very well. Stand back.” He pulls forth a maple wand, taps the iron grid, it shudders violently, and then peels back like the skin of a soft fruit. Thanking the gods for his fortune (and wondering at the incredible irony of his benefactor being someone he does not want to see again), makes sure his assumption is correct.
It is. His savior is none other than Balthazar of the Potion Emporium, with a rather mean-looking pseudodragon curled about his shoulders like a scaly cat. Up close Douvan sees his bushy black eyebrows, and the glint of intelligent green eyes.
“Can you help me up?” asks Douvan.
Rolling his eyes, the mage in the pointed hat starts to oblige, but pulls back. “By the gods, man, you reek! No! I won’t help.”
Douvan pulls himself out and stands up, turns around calmly, and fires an arrow down the shaft. He hears a shriek.
“Do…I know you,” asks the wizard slowly.
Douvan shakes his head. “No. No, I don’t believe you do.”
The cage with Toady had been very dark, and Douvan scampered from sight before they had a good look. But the pseudodragon looks suspicious…and so does his master.
Nevertheless, Douvan thanks them again and then jogs into the crowded streets, putting as much distance as he can between them, and tries to remember how to get to the Green Tankard to tell Merric the story. He needs a beer after all of that.
And a bath.
And there we stopped. That finishes the crossover adventure from KotS, from here on out it is new material.
A full week has passed since Douvan’s incident with Balthazar of the Potion Emporium. He hasn’t seen the wizard since and was not going to worry about it, that is, until the morning he and Merric Littlefoot receive a message at the Green Dragon Inn. It’s from Merple himself, and he wants to speak with them immediately at his shop on Diagon Alley.
Merric hasn’t been paid yet for his last mission to Winterhaven where he and Douvan dug up a magic mirror from the grave of a dead dragon. But Merric knows happened to Merple…he was turned into a frog by a spiteful wizard, and for all Douvan knew, Merple was still in that state. Or worse.
They trudge through town and pound on the door to Merple’s shop, answered at once by “Yes! Yes, come in!” The door swings open of its own volition as it always does, and they are treated again to the smoky dark interior of Merp the Moneylender’s abode.
The squat Halfling is seated behind his desk, but his face is an unusual greenish pallor. He is constantly dabbing himself with a handkerchief and sweating profusely.
“Ah, Merric, Douvan, good to see you, good to see you. Have a seat, have a seat.”
Merple explains quickly why he has asked them here. It is about Balthazar, and Merple makes it quite clear that he wants something personal now…revenge. Balthazar is a menace the Halfling explains, full of himself and his magic and thinks he’s above retribution. Well, that’s just not true, no, no, no, and Merple wants to put that bastard in his place once and for all!
“I’ve been eating flies for days!” the Halfling whispers harshly, his watery eyes following a small buzzing insect even now. He licks his lips, and then shudders, revolted.
Merple’s plan is simple. Trusted sources have told him that Balthazar travels once a month south to Everlund and returns with sacks of gold. How and why no one knows, but Merple is sure beyond a shred of doubt that it is an illegal venture, he can feel it in his bones. One unscrupulous businessman knows another, and Merple thinks that the wizard has his fingers in dirty business.
Now, Balthazar is too powerful to confront directly, but if the heroes were to follow him, acting as mercenaries on the caravan guard, and poke around where Balthazar goes, they might dig up information. Bring this information back to Merple so he can find a way to exploit Balthazar, compromise him, and bring him down by subtle, conniving, methods.
The mission sounds good to the ranger and rogue, and Merple tells them that he has hired two others as well, in case they need more eyes and ears in Everlund. Jolen is a trustworthy cleric of Tempus, and his female companion Nari-lana is a genasi swordmage. They can find them at sunset at the Green Tankard Inn to discuss their mission in private. The merchant caravan will leave South Gate the following morning, and Balthazar will be on it.
“Say nothing to him!” the Halfling insists. “Do not mention me, not even if asked directly. You were hired by the Merchant’s Guild, and leave it at that.”
A price for their services is agreed upon and they shake on it. Douvan and Merric leave and return to the Green Tankard Inn to meet their accomplices at sundown. As expected, the cleric of Tempus and the genasi arrive through the front doors later that evening. The priest is a tall, imposing man, clad in stout metal armor proudly bearing the insigna of Tempus, the god of war. The genasi woman, a rare species not often seen, and one who invokes stares from the commonfolk, stands at his side, a broadsword strapped to her back, her head bald and brown and riddled with small cracks of amber light. Her eyes are bright and pupiless. The group becomes acquainted over dinner and leave with the agreement to meet again the next morning at South Gate.
Dawn arrives cold, blue and invigorating, and the caravan is quickly assembled. There are three wagons drawn by horses and mules, a driver for each, and about ten other travelers and guards accompanying the troupe. Balthazar of the Potion Emporium arrives soon afterward, a red pseudodragon draped around his neck like a scaly scarf.
Douvan wonders if the mage will recognize him, so Douvan keeps his distance, pulls his helm down low and avoids eye contact. If anything though, it is the pseudodragon’s sense of smell that will place him at the scene of Merple’s “mishap”.
The caravan is soon rumbling down the road, and the heroes meet another boisterous traveler on this journey, a blue-skinned genasi with a penchant for loud conversation.
“GREETINGS!” the big man booms, striding beside them. “I am Ghale Stormbrow. Well met!” He turns his face in profile so they can get a good look at his features. Yes, he’s a boastful man. Handsome though. He talks with them for a short bit, mostly about himself, and then returns to the front of the caravan to ensure that no hostiles approach on his watch. As if they would dare!
Balthazar is riding in the foremost wagon with the driver, and although the rest of the group stays with the third and final wagon, Douvan notices later in the day that the little pseudodragon is staring intently at him.
Merric makes sure no one is watching and ducks through the flaps of the middle wagon. It smells of pungent spices, and a quick search reveals crates with dozens and dozens of various colored bottles and vials. They’re all carefully labeled, but he doesn’t spend too much time in here.
They do not pass any other travelers, and by that evening they reach the designated campground that is halfway between Silverymoon and Everlund. The wagons are drawn in close, campfires are stoked, and the hunters scrounge for food to roast over the open flame. Balthazar has spoken to no one all day and continues this trend, reading a book by the light of a candle flame on his finger.
Merric the Halfling gets bored and starts rooting around in another wagon, finding it well stocked with barrels of fine ale, mead and wine from Silverymoon. He hops out and decides to entertain himself (and others) with a short acrobatic performance, doing backflips and somersaults around the campfire to the amusement of Ghale Stormbrow who heartily claps.
“AH! Our little friend is talented! Here’s a copper! Come everyone, share your coppers with this small man, he is wonderful! Very fleet of foot. Aha!”
Merric picks up the meager coins and feigns gratitude. Nari-lana is appalled at the genasi’s stinginess and turns her head in disgust.
The night is otherwise eventless and the caravan continues in the morning on the last leg of the journey. This leg, however, is not as smooth as the previous one.
Around midday they’re on a winding trail through hilly country. A slope to the east rolls down a rocky hill. To the west lies a tree-lined bluff of conifers and birch. The wagons are skirting the narrow road between low ground and high ground. Douvan Stahl is casually looking up at the clear sky, watching the cloud formations float by, when he sees a tree on the bluff above them sway in a breeze that does not exist.
This, he thinks, would make an excellent spot for an ambush. He tells the others. They all squint up but see nothing, so Douvan tells the blue-skinned genasi, Ghale Stormbrow.
“Ah, of course you need my help, friend. Fear not. Stand back. I shall take a closer look for you.”
Gusting wind suddenly lifts the genasi off his feet and gently drops him on the bluff.
Almost instantly a harsh, grating voice bellows out:
“CRUUUUUUSH THEMMM!”
A log flies toward the caravan and impacts two mercenaries, smashing them into a red mist and flinging their bodies down the hill. Chaos ensues. The horses begin bucking, shouts fill the air, terrified drivers try to control the beasts, and steel rings from scabbards as the heroes prepare to defend themselves from unknown assailants.
“BATTLE IS UPON US!” Ghale shouts.
Douvan and the cleric Jolan clamber atop a wagon roof to get clear line of sight over the bluff. Three hulking ogres have appeared from a clump of birch trees, clubs in their hand and holding chains connected to three emaciated bugbears that don’t look happy to be here. But worse, the trees beyond them are swaying as something even bigger is pushing through.
The genasi swordmage Nari-lana clambers up the bluff and pulls out her broadsword, ready to engage the enemy. On the third wagon, Merric the thief deftly leaps to the roof and then jumps to the rise. Three half-elf archers clamber to the top of the wagon after him and notch their arrows.
Meanwhile, Balthazar of the Potion Emporium has risen from his seat on the wagon, apparently unpleased with this unscheduled stop. His pseudo-dragon takes to the air, flapping and hissing. Balthazar grabs his belt, reaches into a purple pouch, and with a vigorous motion, pulls forth a…
…rabbit.
“Godsdammit!” he shouts. “Always a rabbit! Always!”
But the others hardly notice. They have their own problems.
Douvan notches arrows and starts firing at the ogres, but he feels the chill of fear when the largest trees are knocked over and a massive Hill Giant enters the fray, a tree trunk lifted over its head. “ME SMASH YOU!” it bellows, and hurls the tree at Ghale Stormbrow who is hovering twenty feet off the ground. The trunk misses and rolls down the slope, and smiling, the genasi retaliates with a crackling bolt of lightning from the tip of his longsword.
The ogres are screaming at their bugbear allies and tugging the chains. “Get in der and fight! What wrong wid you? Why not you fight?” A bugbear is pushed Nari’s direction, shambles toward her, arms outstretched, and then veers off the last moment, rushing past and leaps off the bluff to the road below, dragging the chain behind it. The other bugbear likewise avoids combat and shambles awkwardly down the slope to where two cowering travelers launch a few frightened arrows at it.
Merric is fast and deadly, delivering viscous cuts to the ogre closest to him before diving out of range. The monster is knocked off balance, stumbling uncertainly at the edge of the bluff and trying to swat the little Halfling who has rolled between his legs.
“Stay still, you!”
“Nope.”
Jolan, cleric of Tempus, calls upon the might of his warrior god, and his prayers are answered. Divine light sears an ogre, and Merric uses the opportunity to sink his dagger deep into its back. Jolen instills uncontrollable fear in yet another ogre and it flees the battle scene, only to return shortly.
“What me thinking? Why me run like dat? Me stoopid.”
Douvan Stahl continues firing arrow after arrow, hampering the enemy as best he can. Between him and the warriors standing atop the last wagon, the two closest ogres have been thoroughly perforated, although they’re still standing strong and fighting to the death.
The giant is being distracted by Balthazar and Ghale Stormbrow. Eldritch purple lightning strikes the giant, and from nowhere a spectral panther manifests, leaping to the back of another ogre and ripping into its shoulder with shadowy teeth that are all too dangerous.
An ogre is finally felled, drilled down by arrow, blade and spell, and it collapses in a bloody heap. Attacks concentrate on the other ogres, and Merric lands a devastating strike to the thing’s groin as he dives between its legs and stabs up. Blood jets between the ogre’s fingers as it holds its crotch, and then Douvan finishes it off with a Twin Strike, planting an arrow in each beady eye.
It is ultimately Balthazar who turns the tide of the battle with a flashy show of magic. The hill giant would have been far too deadly an opponent to face on their own without the wizard’s assistance. Upon twirling his fingers in an arcane pattern, a burst of multi-colored prismatic energy springs toward the last ogre and the hill giant, lashing out at them in a miasma of scintillating power.
[GM Note: I told everyone it was a 15th level Prismatic Spray, so yes, they know that Balthazar is at least a 15th level spellcaster].
Several of the travelers have been cowering, firing their arrows intermittently, and the grizzled old soldier in Jolen rears his head. He was a commander and leader of men in the past, and it burns in his soul even now. Stomping toward the guards, he plants a hand on their shoulders and stares at them with piercing grey eyes.
“You! Are you cowards? Do you want your families to remember you dying this day, as whimpering children hiding behind the mules! Aim those bows at the ogres! Fight like, men, dammit. FIGHT!”
The two guys glance at each other, and then nod vigorously, invigorated by Jolen’s speech and encouraged to face their fear head on! “Yer right, sir! Yer right! What are we waiting for?” They follow Jolen up the slope, aiming for their enemies even though their feeble shots miss by a mile. But Jolen’s mission is accomplished, for he instilled the vigor of battle lust in his allies, even the weakest of them.
[GM Note: That was great. They might even follow you around as henchmen, Jolen!].
The last ogre is finally dropped by a barrage of arrow fire from the guys who CAN hit, and that leaves only the injured hill giant whose logs have inflicted minimal damage to Ghale Stormbrow, who dodged nearly all of them like a leaf in the wind. But the giant is staggering from another spell cast by Balthazar, and loops of flame ring its head, blinding the giant. It decides to flee the battle while it can, and stumbles away, but Merric and the others won’t let the final enemy escape.
Merric slashes the hill giant across the kneecap, drawing a splash of blood, and then runs forward in another daring acrobatic somersault to land on a rock. The monster stumbles, clumsily swinging a tree trunk at the halfling, and just barely manages to clip his foot! But the blow is insufficient to severely harm Merric, and the blow just spins him into an extra rotation as he lands on the bounder beside the wounded and whimpering hill giant.
“BOW BEFORE MERRIC!” the halfing demands, pointing at the giant with his dagger as if it were a king’s scepter.
[GM Note: This was by far the funniest part of the adventure and had us all rolling, but it might not translate well here just by reading it; had to be there].
A couple of dice rolls later, and fear fills the giant’s eyes, flitting from the halfing to the approaching wizard to the flying genasi, to the ranger and to the swordmage…and its fat lips begin to tremble.
“MERCY!” it bellows. “Not kill me! AGH!”
Merric smiles ear-to-ear as the hill giant grovels at his feet, and Merric raises his arms in victory.
Balthazar walks up beside the halfing, an expression of utter bewilderment on his face. “You must be ******* joking,” the wizard snarls. It was Balthazar who crushed the giant, not the halfling, but Merric enjoys taking credit anyway. Balthazar looks disgusted.
The hill giant pulls its knees to its chest, trembling as it is surrounded by the survivors of the ambush. Clearly, this raiding party picked the wrong caravan to mess with. The giant is questioned, and it answers as best it can in thick, broken Common, trying not to meet the eyes of its captors lest they destroy him. The group demands to know where the giant’s treasure is, but it says they don’t really have any yet. Their caravan was the first to be ambushed, and the party sees piles of logs and boulders stockpiled for just such an attack. The group asks about the ogres, and the hill giant says they just agreed to work together.
As for the strange-acting bugbears that wouldn’t attack, the hill giant just says they’re stoopid…the pot calling the kettle black, and the adventurers don't think much more about it.
[In fact though, there is significance to their behavior...]
But then the archers on the back of the last wagon are shouting for assistance, and Douvan runs over to investigate. They point to the flap at the back of the wagon, and peeking in, Douvan sees one of the bugbears cramming foodstuffs into its mouth! It sees Douvan, slows down chewing, but doesn’t stop, reaching carefully for another hardened biscuit. There is still a chain and collar around its neck.
“Get out of there,” the ranger says.
The bugbear complies, easing out of the wagon, and then quickly shambles down the road as fast as it can, spilling crumbs from its mouth as it keeps eating.
“Hey! Stop or I’ll put an arrow in your back!” Douvan shouts, raising his bow. The bugbear does not stop though, and the last second that he can fire before the monster is out of sight, Douvan lowers the weapon. The bugbear flees into the woods.
Balthazar is in a hurry to get the caravan moving again, snarling at the drivers to calm the mounts and to clear the debris off the road. “I have business in Everlund! Hurry up! Time is wasting!”
But the PCs want to find the hill giant’s lair and scavenge it for more treasure, despite the giant saying it doesn’t have any. They ask the giant how far it is, but it doesn’t know. They ask how many giants steps does it takes the walk there, and the giant counts on his fingers.
“One…two…three….more dan three.”
Balthazar is FURIOUS at more delays, but they convince him that it will take time to bury the dead and to clear the road. Jolen volunteers to bury the two mercenaries under some rocks and say a prayer to Tempus over them, guiding their brave souls to the afterlife. The other PCs follow the trail of shattered trunks and smashed bushes about a mile up into hilly terrain, eventually finding a shallow cave and a large bed of flea-infested animal skins stitched together into a crude blanket. Here, they do find a large locked trunk, but inside is just a finely crafted outfit of noble’s attire that might fetch a fair price in the right market.
When they return they ask the giant about the box and the clothes, and where it got them, but the giant just says it forgot. Indeed, the box had not been broken and was locked. But now they have the problem of the subdued giant sitting on the ground.
“Kill it,” says Douvan. “It will just ambush someone else. Won’t you?”
“NOO!” the giant moans, shaking its head, but they don’t really believe the thing. Even if it was truthful, it’s dumb enough to forget its promise. The giants are notoriously evil and stupid.
Merric gives it an ultimatum, which the giant readily accepts: pick up your club and fight honorably to the death—or strip naked and run from here like a coward.
The hill giant is naked in a heartbeat (everyone turns their heads, groaning in disgust), tugging down its raggedy trousers and then trundling up the hillside, its bare white buttocks wagging goodbye to the heroes. Whether or not they’ll see this particular hill giant troubling wayfarers again remains to be seen. Hopefully not naked.
The rest of the day passes uneventfully, and by evening they have arrived at Everlund, a walled fort city of some ten thousand occupants. People mill about the streets, and the smells of commerce and hot food wafts over the party members.
“Last stop,” says Ghale Stormbrow, crossing his hefty arms. “You fought admirably today. It was a pleasure to battle at your side, and I hope you learned from my techniques. I’m sure you did. Until we meet again!”
Balthazar disembarks without a word to anyone, and the group decides they’ll need to split up. Merric decides to tail the wizard, and Douvan will follow Merric to watch his back. Jolen the cleric knows that there is a shrine to Tempus in Everlund, although not a full temple or church. They agree to meet at the shrine later. The cleric’s plan is to target a tavern or other place of gossip in a more seedy part of town, and since Everlund is largely a trading post full of travelers and adventurers, seedy parts of town abound.
Jolen takes his two henchmen to the Stag Horn Tavern where they discuss what happened on the road with anyone who will listen. “Drinks on me, friends, I’ve a tale to tell! We were just ambushed on the road today by ogres and a giant, and you’ve not seen magic like our wizard had! Balthazar was his name. Do you know of him? He must be famous…” The cleric is able to draw a crowd and slowly pick them for information, although it ultimately turns up very little.
He decides to stop by a local magic shop, the Witch’s Crook, where an ugly hook-nosed hag nods to him as he enters. “Help ye, love?” Jolen knows about the problem that Balthazar had with Merple the Moneylender, something about how Merple cheated the mage out of a spell component, something called…powered unicorn hoof? Or was it horn? He’s not sure now. Jolen inspects the wall of jars and vials and bags, finding numerous tidbits for rituals that could help his own magical endeavors, and finally comes across a small amount of powder labeled as Unicorn Horn.
“Why would someone need this?” he asks the crone.
“Oh, that, hmm, yes.” She nods, grinning in a non-pleasant way. “For necromancy it is. Or healing in the right hands. A unicorn does not give its horn up lightly. Someone killed it for that yes, hmm. Not me, love! I just sell it.”
Meanwhile, Nari-lana the genasi swordmage inquires around town if anyone knows of a wizard named Balthazar, and in wider brush strokes, tries to learn the current gossip. She spends two hours asking questions and listening carefully to answers, and she unearths several interesting tidbits:
1) No, no one is familiar with a wizard named Balthazar.
2) There is a magnificent feast beginning tomorrow, BurgerFest! Named after the Mayor, Horace Burger. It lasts for three days and features scrumptious food from all around the Realms, and the most wonderful little things called “burgers.” Many people would readily pay a gold piece for a full burger meal and good beer.
3) There used to be a terrible bugbear problem in the region, but in the past few months Mayor Burger has managed to fix it up. With diplomacy, somehow.
4) Mayor Burger is a connoisseur of fine food and wine, and in fact, has dedicated half of his estate in Everlund to a 5-Coin restaurant, Burger’s Palace.
5) The standing army of Everlund is down by at least half from an original 2000 troops. Many weren’t being paid enough and migrated north to Silverymoon.
Back to Merric and Douvan:
Balthazar has bolted through town, glancing behind him occasionally and using his pseudodragon as an extra pair of eyes, but Merric keeps to the shadows. Evening has arrived and before long the town will be draped in darkness. The wizard eventually steps inside a public Bath House: The Steamy Towel. Merric swipes a disguise off a merchant’s clothing rack (making appropriate rolls and not getting caught) and saunters into the bathhouse after the mage.
Douvan sees Merric enter and the ranger does a sweep of the exterior, noting that there is no back door, although a second level does feature numerous windows. Douvan Stahl plants himself outside, inconspicuously watching anyone who enters or leaves.
Merric makes a thorough sweep of the building, pushing through hot steamy rooms and seeing more naked old men than he would care too, but he ultimately finds no Balthazar. Discouraged, he finally leaves.
“I lost him,” he tells Douvan. And the ranger didn’t see the wizard leave either.
Discouraged, they have no idea what to do now.
They decide to head back to the Silver Gate entrance where the caravans were originally dispatched. They’re all gone now, but Merric and Douvan ask where they might have gone. It turns out that one of the wagons did belong to Balthazar, at least some of the contents, but it wasn’t the wagon he was sitting on. Shortly after the wagon arrived a heavily-scarred human arrived to pick it up and drove it out of the Mountain Gate to the north.
It’s the only clue they have, so Merric and Douvan head to the Mountain Gate and walk briskly up the road, wondering how far of a lead this scarred man has with Balthazar’s wagon. Night has fallen by now so the Halfling lights an everburning torch, and they continue following the wheel ruts in the road.
But half an hour later someone speaks to them from the dark woods:
“YOU TWO! Stop where you are. Lay down your weapons and we’ll let you live.”
Another voice on the opposite side of the road says, “Ayup. He’s right. I’d do it.”
Merric and Douvan freeze. They can’t see anything beyond the meager glow of the torch. It is dark out tonight with no moon, but Merric thinks fast and plunges the torch into his shirt, shutting off its light.
“Damn!” someone snarls.
They hear twigs snapping and bow strings creaking, but there is no line of sight on either side of the combatants. Merric stealthfully moves to the treeline and draws his dagger. Douvan tries to creep ahead in slow quiet steps, but now he can’t see his comrade at all. They heard two voices but there might be more, and they could easily be aiming bows at them right now, waiting for the chance to fire.
Merric finally pulls the torch out quickly, just to give himself some bearings, and an arrow immediately shoots out at him. It misses, but someone else fires at Douvan, piercing his arm. The ranger dives into the woods, trying to pinpoint the source of the attack. Merric follows him, and seconds later they’ve both converged on a dour dwarf and a masked human!
Merric wastes no time attacking the dwarf, exchanging a few heated blows until Douvan backs him up. Within seconds the dwarf is down and the masked human runs for his life. Douvan grabs a fallen torch and sprints after him, ultimately planting an arrow in his back and the brigand falls. They find little on the bodies except some gold, and from the sounds in the woods, there are other brigands retreating from the fight.
Sheathing their weapons, the ranger and rogue continue following the wagon tracks.
A while later the trail diverges again, and Douvan surmises that their quarry bore east along a side trail. They head that direction, and eventually come upon a railed wooden fence, and then a gate bearing a sign: BLACKJACK’S PIG FARM.
Oh, yes, it’s a pig farm indeed; and they smelled it long before they saw it. In the distance over an expanse of black fields they see tiny lights winking inside a large squat building. [Although this picture is a daytime picture, it is the layout of the farm if they could fully see it]:
Merric and Douvan can’t really see anything other than the distant lights at the farmhouse. Eschewing the road route, they clamber over the fence and enter the pig pens. Squealing, grunting pigs are dismayed at their presence, and they make a lot of racket as the two adventures push through their ranks. Douvan Stahl smears his entire body in pig (I assume he did this to mask his scent in case the pseduodragon was around?) and Merric takes a few steps back. Nasty. The ranger is going to catch filth-fever!
But the pigs have disturbed the dogs. Now that they’re closer, they see at least six dogs in front of the house. Some are chained, some not, but all are barking. They’re big dogs too, rottweiller mixes or maybe wolfhounds. Douvan and Merric climb out of the pens and circle around in a wide berth to the back of the house where it’s dark. They see a shed off to the side and approach it, but once closer, Douvan sees a dog lying on the stoop. He tries to approach and calm it with Animal Training, but the dog is a vicious guard dog and not willing to listen. It immediately leaps forward, snarling and snapping, and bites the ranger’s leg. Douvan smacks it across the face the flat of his blade, sending the dog squealing off into the dark. The other dogs are yapping their heads off even louder. Someone is bound to come investigate.
Merric uses the distraction and breaks a window in the shed. Inside he finds a wagon, and judging from the smell of herbs and spices, this is the same wagon on the road from Silverymoon. But whose is it, and why? Is this Balthazar’s stuff?
They just don’t know. Merric and Douvan flee for the dark woodline just as someone exits the farmhouse. He’s big and burly, and possibly scarred on the face. The man carries a lantern in one hand and a broadsword in the other.
“Who’s out there? Show yerself!”
The dogs are yapping and howling, a few of them straining at their chains while a few are roaming free. After a minute or so the scarred man retreats inside. Merric and Douvan wait for things to cool down. They’re not sure what to do. Their comrades have no idea where they are and they’ve been gone for hours.
[GM Note: Yeah, this was a situation where two players were the in the spotlight for a long time while the others watched or read a book; it happens].
Finally the dogs all go to sleep, but there are lights on inside. Merric stands up, stretches the weariness from his muscles, and is going to sneak closer for another look…
…when they hear clomping horse hooves.
A black stallion gallops up the road, bearing a lone rider with long red robes and a golden beard. The dogs are on their feet and barking incessantly. The man vaults off the horse once at the door and waves a hand across his face…instantly transforming into the black-bearded and black-clad Balthazar of the Potion Emporium. The red pseudodragon is curled around his neck. Balthazar knocks twice on the door and then enters, closing it behind him.
The dogs whimper, yawn, and finally go back to a fitful sleep, keeping one eye open for more intruders.
The session begins immediately where the last one ended.
Merric Littlefoot and Douvan Stahl are waiting in the shadows after Balthazar has arrived at Blackjack’s Pig Farm. They’re in a green field, the scent of grass and pig wafting around them, but mostly from Douvan who has slathered himself in feces to shield his presence from the nosy pseudodragon. (Oh, the poo-poo jokes were flying thick this session; I won’t even bother recounting them all).
Eventually the two heroes sneak closer to the building, trying to find a window or door to allow entrance. They’re careful to avoid the dogs congregated at the front stoop. Sliding through the shadows, they finally press up against a window, only to find it barred and the drapes shut. They can’t see inside, but they CAN hear Balthazar’s voice raised in anger:
“There’s not enough! We’ll need more, many more. You fool! You had a month to take care of this!”
The other voice sounds like the scarred man from before, very apologetic now, and then the voices fade. They hear a door slam. And then a door opens, the front door, and light spills into the darkness. A man’s shadow is extended from the portal of light. They hear wings and something flutters into the night, most likely that invisible pseudodragon. Merric and Douvan barely breathe as they huddle against the wall. If that little monster can see in the dark then there’s no way they can hide from it…
They hear the thing a few more times, like a bat circling around, and it eventually returns and the door shuts.
Merric and Douvan decide that this has been enough risk for one evening. Their companions Jolen the cleric and Nari-lanna don’t even know where they are, and rather than split up again and risk brigands on the road and angry wizards at the farm, the duo returns to Everlund as fast as they can.
Back in town, they reconvene with their allies who have been waiting at the shrine of Tempus. Merric and Douvan have been gone for hours and the others were starting to get worried. Merric has swiped a jar of spices from the wagon at the farm, so they’ll take a closer look at that, but it’s nothing more than oregano and parsley. It is only 10 pm and they feel that there is still some snooping that can be done.
Their thoughts return to the Merchant Guild, the caravan and the wagons. What was Balthazar carrying? Is it a huge secret? How much does Mayor Horace know about this? Do the travel logs have a detailed listing of the contents of the wagons? Douvan and Merric decide to break into the warehouse and find the logs, while Nari-lana and Jolen return to a tavern and start asking about Balthazar and Blackjack, the scarred man.
Turns out that a lot of people know Blackjack. He’s an ornery ex-soldier from the Everlund militia and he’s now a pig farmer operating outside of town. He’s not particularly well liked. But no one has heard of a wizard named Balthazar.
At the merchant warehouse on the River Rauvin, Merric and Douvan find four guards stationed at each of the cardinal corners. By luck, the guard at the south has dozed off in his chair, and Merric is able to sneak up, pick the lock and infiltrate the building. Douvan scuttles in behind the halfing, but the guard is roused at the last second. Wiping the sleep from his eyes, he fails to notice the cracked door beside him, and soon falls back asleep. Douvan carefully and quietly locks the door.
[GM Note: Breaking into thewarehouse created the inevitable option of burning it down and killing all the guards, preferably by tying them to a barrel of gasoline, the first in a long series of destruction across the Realms].
They search quickly by candlelight, and eventually find the ledger from that morning. Indeed, there were dozens and dozens of various spices labeled, but nothing comes across as unusual. Somewhat discouraged, they leave the warehouse (intact) and return to their companions. There is not much more to do tonight, so they decide to get a good night’s rest and start again in the morning. After all, that will be the first day of BurgerFest and the heroes are very curious to see what all the fuss is about.
Dawn arrives, and the buzz of excitement is apparent. In fact, huge banners have been hung above all the main gates into town:
Jolen still has the admiration and devotion of Henchman #1 and Henchman #2, the two men whom he convinced to battle the ogres and giant the day before. For now, they’re steadfastly devoted to the priest and want to help him. So Jolen has Henchman #1 watch the Mountain Gate, with orders to leave a message at the shrine of Tempus if either Blackjack, Balthazar, or a wizard with blond hair and red robes comes to Everlund.
And then they’re off to Burger’s Palace, Mayor Burger’s home/5-coin restaurant, where a line has already formed. People are bustling with excitement, jittery and literally salivating at the thought of lunch. Followed by dinner. And then a big breakfast the next day. The heroes find this very odd and remind each other to NOT eat any of the burgers! It sounds suspiciously like a magical compulsion.
There’s a band playing outside of Burger’s Palace, and soon Mayor Horace Burger appears at the front doors himself, standing on the dais and spreading his arms wide.
“Greetings, friends! Civilians and neighbors and guests! Not much longer now, and the doors will officially open for Burgerfest! I can’t wait, and I know you can’t either! See you soon!”
And Burger returns inside.
Merric, Douvan, Nari-lana and Jolen soon find the delivery entrance to Burger’s Palace, in a busy alley in the back. White-apron wearing cooks, chefs and busboys with tall white hats are busy unloading food and from wagons…and who should be here but Blackjack the pig farmer, scars and all.
“Hurry it up,” the big man is saying. “I got business to finish.”
It looks to Merric like Blackjack has driven the same wagon where all the spices were kept the night before at his farm. It also looks like workers are unloading meat from the wagon. It’s very important that they get some more samples, and sneaking into the busy kitchen looking like a bunch of tough adventurers will be very hard to do.
[GM Note: This also spawned the idea of killing cooks on their cigarette break, wearing their outfits and sneaking into the kitchen that way. It didn’t happen either (thank goodness)].
However, an idea that does sound plausible comes from Jolen the cleric. Pushing ahead, he boldly strides up to Blackjack.
“Those scars, my friend,” he says in his most machismo voice. “You have seen as much battle as I have! Tell me, what did that to you? A dragon I bet! Last mistake it made, yes? HA!”
Merric Littlefoot is hiding nearby, hoping that Jolen can distract Blackjack enough from the wagon so that the Halfling can steal more goods to inspect. This instigated a quick Skill Challenge where Jolen tried to think of various points of interest and conversation to distract the burly scarred pig farmer, relying mostly on Diplomacy and History.
Blackjack is standoffish at first, but Jolen is able to lull him into a story of an encounter Blackjack had years back at the Goblin Marches, describing the dozen of little bastards he butchered that day! Oh yes, that’s where he got the scars, not from a dragon but from little gobbers. Jolen is able to convince Blackjack to join him for a beer and a burger later at Burger’s Palace.
Oddly, the pig farmer agrees to the beer, but declines the burger.
The distraction is sufficient (and the DC lowered) for Merric to swipe another bottle of spices. He sneaks off with it, and determines that it is just cayenne pepper, and Nari-lana the swordmage does not detect the hint of magic. Another dead end.
Blackjack is done soon afterward and clambers atop his wagon, heading toward the Mountain Gate. Merric the Halfling rogue decides to follow him at a distance, not that he could keep up anyway.
In the alley behind Burger’s Palace, the other party members try one more idea. They discreetly pull a cook aside and tell him that they’ll pay good gold for a sample of cooked meat and uncooked meat from Blackjack’s farm. The cook balks at first, but when he sees the ten gold coins jangling in front of him, his concern evaporates.
“Wait here. Ten minutes,” he says, and goes inside. He returns with a paper sack, exchanges it for the gold, and then tells them to get the hell away before they’re caught. Inside the sack are two balls of meat in wax paper, one cooked and one raw.
And they both radiate a faint aura of magic.
So, now the PCs know that whatever enchantment was probably done to meat was done before it reached Burger’s Palace. Whatever Blackjack and Balthazar are doing, it most likely happens at the farm.
But Nari-lana is concerned about Merric so she follows him to Blackjack’s farm. In the meantime, Jolen and Douvan Stahl wait in line at Burger’s Palace, hoping to get a few words in with Mayor Horace Burger himself (who does look suspiciously like Baron Harkonnen). The big man is there, and he openly and flamboyantly takes a big, messy bite of the first burger to kick off the festival. Cheers erupt, clapping ensues, and BurgerFest has officially begun.
Jolen still has the admiration and devotion of Henchman #1 and Henchman #2, the two men whom he convinced to battle the ogres and giant the day before. For now, they’re steadfastly devoted to the priest and want to help him. So Jolen has Henchman #1 watch the Mountain Gate, with orders to leave a message at the shrine of Tempus if either Blackjack, Balthazar, or a wizard with blond hair and red robes comes to Everlund.
And then they’re off to Burger’s Palace, Mayor Burger’s home/5-coin restaurant, where a line has already formed. People are bustling with excitement, jittery and literally salivating at the thought of lunch. Followed by dinner. And then a big breakfast the next day. The heroes find this very odd and remind each other to NOT eat any of the burgers! It sounds suspiciously like a magical compulsion.
There’s a band playing outside of Burger’s Palace, and soon Mayor Horace Burger appears at the front doors himself, standing on the dais and spreading his arms wide.
“Greetings, friends! Civilians and neighbors and guests! Not much longer now, and the doors will officially open for Burgerfest! I can’t wait, and I know you can’t either! See you soon!”
And Burger returns inside.
Merric, Douvan, Nari-lana and Jolen soon find the delivery entrance to Burger’s Palace, in a busy alley in the back. White-apron wearing cooks, chefs and busboys with tall white hats are busy unloading food and from wagons…and who should be here but Blackjack the pig farmer, scars and all.
“Hurry it up,” the big man is saying. “I got business to finish.”
It looks to Merric like Blackjack has driven the same wagon where all the spices were kept the night before at his farm. It also looks like workers are unloading meat from the wagon. It’s very important that they get some more samples, and sneaking into the busy kitchen looking like a bunch of tough adventurers will be very hard to do.
[GM Note: This also spawned the idea of killing cooks on their cigarette break, wearing their outfits and sneaking into the kitchen that way. It didn’t happen either (thank goodness)].
However, an idea that does sound plausible comes from Jolen the cleric. Pushing ahead, he boldly strides up to Blackjack.
“Those scars, my friend,” he says in his most machismo voice. “You have seen as much battle as I have! Tell me, what did that to you? A dragon I bet! Last mistake it made, yes? HA!”
Merric Littlefoot is hiding nearby, hoping that Jolen can distract Blackjack enough from the wagon so that the Halfling can steal more goods to inspect. This instigated a quick Skill Challenge where Jolen tried to think of various points of interest and conversation to distract the burly scarred pig farmer, relying mostly on Diplomacy and History.
Blackjack is standoffish at first, but Jolen is able to lull him into a story of an encounter Blackjack had years back at the Goblin Marches, describing the dozen of little bastards he butchered that day! Oh yes, that’s where he got the scars, not from a dragon but from little gobbers. Jolen is able to convince Blackjack to join him for a beer and a burger later at Burger’s Palace.
Oddly, the pig farmer agrees to the beer, but declines the burger.
The distraction is sufficient (and the DC lowered) for Merric to swipe another bottle of spices. He sneaks off with it, and determines that it is just cayenne pepper, and Nari-lana the swordmage does not detect the hint of magic. Another dead end.
Blackjack is done soon afterward and clambers atop his wagon, heading toward the Mountain Gate. Merric the Halfling rogue decides to follow him at a distance, not that he could keep up anyway.
In the alley behind Burger’s Palace, the other party members try one more idea. They discreetly pull a cook aside and tell him that they’ll pay good gold for a sample of cooked meat and uncooked meat from Blackjack’s farm. The cook balks at first, but when he sees the ten gold coins jangling in front of him, his concern evaporates.
“Wait here. Ten minutes,” he says, and goes inside. He returns with a paper sack, exchanges it for the gold, and then tells them to get the hell away before they’re caught. Inside the sack are two balls of meat in wax paper, one cooked and one raw.
And they both radiate a faint aura of magic.
So, now the PCs know that whatever enchantment was probably done to meat was done before it reached Burger’s Palace. Whatever Blackjack and Balthazar are doing, it most likely happens at the farm.
But Nari-lana is concerned about Merric so she follows him to Blackjack’s farm. In the meantime, Jolen and Douvan Stahl wait in line at Burger’s Palace, hoping to get a few words in with Mayor Horace Burger himself (who does look suspiciously like Baron Harkonnen). The big man is there, and he openly and flamboyantly takes a big, messy bite of the first burger to kick off the festival. Cheers erupt, clapping ensues, and BurgerFest has officially begun.
Back at the farm, Merric and Nari-lana loiter outside the gate. There’s nothing openly suspicious happening, but there is no way to approach the house without being seen. There’s just too much open ground. They wait for a while, talking quietly among themselves about their options, when they both hear flapping wings! The wooden sign shakes, and immediately they see the red pseudodragon streaking toward the farmhouse after invisibly eavesdropping on them the whole time.
The game is up, and the two heroes boldly enter the gate and approach, for better or worse. Their PLAN (and they do have one) is to tell Balthazar that BurgerFest has erupted into chaos, riots, and other assorted trouble and they have been sent to retrieve more meat asap (I think that was the plan anyway, or some variation of it).
The dogs are barking long before they reach the front door, and then Blackjack is in the front yard, pointing a notched broadsword at them.
“Private property! Bugger off while you still can!”
Merric unveils their lie, also weaving in loose details as to how they are “Burger Police” (“I’m the Hamburglar sent from Lord McDonald, and this is my companion, Grimace”) but Blackjack isn’t buying a word of it.
And, apparently, neither is Balthazar, who steps out right behind the pig farmer, the pseudodragon crouched on his shoulder. Balthazar demands (and he does this cordially, but with a definite aura of “Don’t With Me”) that Merric and Nari-lana tell them why they are here. He remembers them from the caravan and the ogre attack, and finds it extremely curious and highly unlikely that they would be here now peddling some story about a burger riot. In fact, the whole story amuses him and their attempt at subterfuge.
Merric and Nari-lana don’t say anything about Merple or the burger conspiracy, but Balthazar volunteers some knowledge of his own. Apparently, it seems, because he is in somewhat of a bind and needs help immediately.
Balthazar offers to hire Merric and Nari-lana by doubling whatever they’re being paid from their current “employer.” They’re all ears.
Balthazar explains that he has discovered a powerful spell that can turn goblins into piglets. It is still in the experimental stage and he needs more live specimens. Blackjack had been capturing goblins in the month-long interim between Balthazar’s visits, but the pig farmer has had trouble this month and captured only three. It is a woeful shortage.
Balthazar wants them (the party) to find him as many living goblins as possible and return them to the farm. He is also aware that Douvan Stahl is not here, as well as the bold cleric of Tempus, Jolen. Merric and Nari-lana won’t do anything without their companions, and Balthazar agrees to cast Animal Messenger to relay the request.
Minutes later, a carp is flopping down the road toward—wait, I mean a sparrow if flapping toward Everlund, zips into Burger’s Palace and magically finds its quarry. Surprised to hear the bird speaking to them, Jolen and Douvan blink rapidly as the message is relayed:
“NOT A TRAP…COME TO FARM…MERRIC AND NARI-LANA NEED HELP…BALTHAZAR OFFERS DEAL…GOLD…COME AT ONCE…”
Well, it still sounds like a trap, but lacking a better option, the ranger and cleric pack up and head out (plus, they metagame know what was happening).
An hour later they arrive and everyone is invited into the farm house where Balthazar opens a bottle of fine Sembian red wine and relates the details of his problem again.
But Nari-lana detects a nitpick; there are plenty of pigs in the pen. Something must be working right. How many of those used to be goblins? And what does that have to do with Burgerfest and the strange reactions from the public?
Balthazar slyly answers that he has been hired by Horace Burger to solve a goblinoid problem in the area, and he will do so any way possible. What Blackjack does with the meat afterward is none of his concern. But the wizard is not telling the whole truth, and Nari-lana does not press the issue. There’s definitely something strange happening here.
A fee of 300 gold coins per person is agreed upon for services rendered, and Balthazar insists that Blackjack must accompany them. After all, the farmer/hunter knows where the goblin lair is. Daylight is wasting, so they prepare their gear and shuffle outside, ready to wrangle some goblins for the wizard and return by dinnertime.
[GM Note: -2 to attack a minion with the intent to “strike unconscious”; on a successful save the goblin is knocked out; failed save, it was hit too hard and dies anyway]
They haven’t gotten very far when Balthazar calls out. “Oh, and take this! It’s useless to me; maybe it will serve you better.” He throws Jolen a purple cloth bag.
“What’s it do?” he asks.
Balthazar smiles roguishly. “It’s full of rabbits.”
The hike to the goblin den is an hour long and gives the group time to pester Blackjack with questions. First of all, why does he work for the wizard? The hunter grudgingly admits that he has known Balthazar a long time, and the gold is good, and that’s all he cares about. But like his boss, Blackjack is not telling the whole truth, guarding his words carefully, but the heroes don’t press the issue. Maybe in time they can uncover the real story. Maybe the camaraderie formed in battle can draw them closer together and usurp whatever loyalty Blackjack feels for the mage. If any.
Eventually they reach a clearing that opens onto a mysterious mound ringed by great stone monoliths many thousands of years old. This place, explains Blackjack, is known as Henge.
The gods represented here are no longer worshipped, not to his knowledge at least. Not many people know this place exists. Merric and Douvan creep to the top of the mound, noting the weathered statues and barely legible archaic pictograms. Some of the people featured in the bas-reliefs look vaguely angelic and have only three fingers. The rogue and ranger are looking for a second entrance, but after a thorough search they can find nothing.
“The gobs got smart,” the hunter growls. “Got wise to me traps and nets. But I followed ‘em here, I did. Seen them coming in and out of that tree trunk. That’s the entrance.”
Indeed, there are relatively fresh tracks (within the past 24 hours) around the hole in the fallen tree. It is narrow though, and only Merric can comfortably squeeze inside, and he’s not volunteering for that. Not yet. Actually, no one wants to shimmy down the hole into the dark, and they start thinking about ways to smoke the goblins out. It all depends on how big the warren is and if there is another exit or not; too many variables that they don’t have answers to. And then they consider Balthazar’s Bag of Bunnies. They decide to throw a rabbit in and see what happens, so the swordmage reaches for the bag, feels something warm and fuzzy and pulsating, and pulls it out.
The ball of fur immediately transforms into a large, roaring lion, and definitely not a rabbit.
Nari-lana stumbles back in surprise, but the lion is subservient to her. It is a magical beast, somewhat smaller than a real lion, but it also has a telepathic link and obeys her wishes with but a thought.
“Get down that hole!” the swordmage orders, and growling, the lion obeys. It squeezes into the tree trunk and is soon gone. They can hear it growling, but they don’t hear any terrified goblin squeals or curses. Blackjack and Jolen ready a net outside in the case the goblins come running out screaming for their lives. They wait a few minutes, hearing the growls from the lion recede. They wait a little longer. When it’s clear that the lion was not attacked, Merric goes down the hole first to see what is happening.
There is enough ambient light from the surface to see a small room about thirty feet across and fifteen feet high. A stone pillar rises from the center, the bas-reliefs similar to the monoliths on the mound above them. A ledge rings the entire room and three small goblin-sized holes lead out. There’s no sign of the lion. Merric climbs all the way down and inspects the side tunnels. The east and west tunnels have collapsed and are impassable, but the south tunnel features both goblin tracks and lion tracks. Merric breaks out an everburning torch and peeks down, and then returns to his friends to give them an update. One by one they all climb inside the tree trunk until they’re in the central room, and from here, Merric continues his search.
The Halfling follows the lion tracks down the cramped, dusty tunnel, but about thirty feet later the tracks just…stop. He finds this strange, but considering where the lion came from originally, not overtly strange. Maybe it had a specific duration or a limit to the distance. He continues and soon finds another odd thing: there are six slots in the hallway, three on the left, three on the right. They look wide enough to jab spears through and could easily be a trap.
Merric snuffs his torch out and sneaks past the slots. Nothing happens, and eventually he reaches the bottom of this tunnel that opens up into a much larger mine shaft.
Nari-lana follows Merric, and they soon creep out into the tunnel, wary of any danger, but they see and hear nothing except for a dimly flickering torch to the west. The tunnel curves up to the east. Ancient mine tracks fill the center of the floor, rusted from hundreds of years of disuse, and several overturned ore carts are here too.
The others come down too and they head toward the single flickering torch. There is a gaping rectangular hole in the center of the tunnel. Two narrow ledges circumvent it, and Merric peeks over the edge. There’s a rickety ladder here and twenty feet down sharp rusted spikes fill the entire pit. Merric climbs down, noting goblin prints in the dirt, and after searching around is able to find a concealed goblin tunnel. He gently presses it open and peeks in. The tunnel curves away and is utterly dark, so he brings out the everburning torch again and continues.
Meanwhile, Jolen wants to get past the spike pit, but the ledge he’s on abruptly crumbles beneath his feet! He is painfully dashed to the spikes below, noticing now that both ledges were designed to collapse. Jolen climbs back out, dusts himself off, and continues to the tunnel junction. The tracks descend at both splits, but rubble has closed the routes. He notices a sign on the wall, and wiping the dust off, murmurs the words aloud in Common:
TALLOW’S DEEP
That must be what this place is.
[GM Note: I ran Adam through this adventure many, many years ago in 2e. It will be interesting to see what he remembers and what changes in the 4e update. His first D&D character also died here, so it will be fitting in a way if his newest one dies here too! Full circle ].
Meanwhile, Merric is scuttling like a roach through the goblin tunnels, hoping that he can cope with whatever he finds. He reaches a junction and clambers to the left, finding a solid wall. He searches and discovers yet another concealed goblin door, and pushing it open slightly, sees light beyond. He backtracks to his friends, and together everyone enters the tunnels and returns to that spot. Merric opens the door and finds that they have merely made a full circle back into the main tunnel.
That leaves one final direction unexplored. They all head south, finally dropping into a small, round chamber that is tall enough for them to stand. The only way out is yet another goblin tunnel leading to the west…
And they still haven’t seen a single living thing.
Ok then. That final picture above is actually the official FIRST room of Tallow's Deep in the Dungeon adventure. The other stuff i added in. If anyone was wondering if they were actually ever going to get to the dungeon after all this burger business, yes, they're finally here, and will find to their dismay that it is not the cakewalk they expected.
The group is huddled in a small cramped room with only one apparent exit, an even smaller goblin tunnel. They’ve already progressed deeper than anticipated and have seen no foes.
“They begged for their lives, they did,” Blackjack grunts, almost as if musing over a fond memory. “The ones I captured for Balthazar. Never worked for ‘em, they all died in the end, but they begged anyways. They told stories of a statue down here, some big statue of their dark god named… Mag…Mag…Mag something or other, I dunno…with ruby eyes as big as my fist!” The grizzled ex-soldier balls his fist to show them. “I never believed the bloody gobbers, until now…and now I wonder if it was true. Tell you what; if we find this statue, one of those rubies is mine. The other you can split.”
The group doesn’t argue with Blackjack. All they want is ten live goblins for Balthazar so he can finish his ritual, whatever that entails exactly, so it is decided that Merric should lead the way. He’s the only one small enough to navigate the cramped tunnels with ease. Everburning torch in one hand, dagger in the other, Merric slinks into the tunnel. It’s small, four feet high and five feet wide and slightly claustrophobic even for him. The narrow passage ends in a dead-end chamber high enough for the others to stand. Dust, rocks and broken spear heads litter the floor, most of them crumbling from age. Veins of silver used to be here too but have long since been stripped clean.
A thorough search of the room uncovers a goblin door. These round hatches are undetectable at a glance, blending so perfectly into the surrounding stone that even a dwarf would be proud of the craftsmanship. Merric presses the door open, seeing a tiny tunnel stretching west around a bend. He continues, beckoning for the others to squeeze in behind, but not too close. Fifty feet later the narrow tunnel ends in a small room. Engraved on the wall to the west is a leering stone goblin.
To the east is yet another narrow tunnel leaving this room. Sand and small rocks cover the floor. Merric searches the large stone face but finds nothing. Douvan Stahl, human ranger, steps into the room toward the small goblin tunnel, but just as his foot is about to set down, Jolen the Cleric of Tempus brusquely grips his shoulder.
“No. Don’t move. The floor is false.”
Sure enough, the far corner is thin canvas covered by debris.
Merric searches for traps, and then carefully slices through the canvas with his dagger. Dirt, sand and rocks fall through the growing crack, and then SUDDENLY a piercing shriek fills the room. It is painfully loud, but not enough to inflict damage. Ten feet down at the bottom of the pit are several colorful large mushrooms, quivering from vibrations.
“Shriekers,” mutters Douvan. “Early warning system. If gobs are nearby they know someone’s here.”
More searching around the leering goblin reveals another hidden goblin tunnel, but Merric doesn’t want to leave the passage to the east over the pit unexplored. He deftly jumps over the shrieker and finds a short dead-end corridor. A few minutes of poking and prodding reveals nothing, so this was likely just a trap to make trespassers walk over the canvas to reach the tunnel. Already they’re starting to see that this place is riddled with goblin tunnels, and they start to wonder how many they’ve already missed…
Merric advances into the new goblin tunnel, light from his everburning torch revealing a narrow rough-hewn passage that bends sharply south. He peeks around and sees a half-raised portcullis, and a small room beyond with a wooden table and four wooden chairs. A strange contraption of levers, pulleys, ropes and bones sits on the table. And THEN…for just a hair of a second, Merric glimpses a green face and beady red eyes peeking at him from a tunnel on the far side of the room. They make eye contact, but the goblin’s face is gone in a blink.
Merric isn’t keen on leaping into the room alone, so he informs his friends of what he saw. Nari-lana the sword mage summons her bonded soulblade to the block the portcullis, and everyone quickly filters into the room. A few torches burn on the walls, their ruddy light glinting off copper pennies scattered across the table. On the west wall is a wheel and pulley that raises and lowers the portcullis, which they carefully test.
The contraption on the table seems to be a crude game. Levers can be manipulated to drop rocks onto rat skulls, thoroughly crushing them, and the goblins have been betting on the outcome. The amount of coppers on the table is paltry and therefore ignored. There’s only one exit from this chamber, a small goblin tunnel, but Merric sees that it quickly expands into a ten-foot by –eight foot corridor of rough stone, extending well beyond the range of his torch. They bring out Nari-lana’s magic lantern which sheds light in a much wider berth. Some sixty feet away the passage seems to bend south.
In fact, the whole tunnel stinks like a trap. Merric muses as to how he would like to push a barrel down the whole hallway to set off anything lying in wait.
The rogue prods the ground where the goblin tunnel becomes larger, even poking the nearby walls, but Douvan coughs quietly and points at a small goblin door the Halfling missed. Reddening from embarrassment, Merric quietly pops the door open. Yet again, another tiny passage extends left and right at a T-junction. This goblin warren is suffused with winding and backtracking passages built just for the goblins. But in a wise move, the party assumes that it is far LESS likely for the goblin tunnels to be trapped, so they elected to head this direction, squeezing uncomfortably inside, rather than navigating the larger route.
Merric moves west, followed by Douvan and Nari-lana, and Blackjack remains to guard the opened goblin door. The Halfling thief twists and turns a few times and then finds a dead end: but there are goblin letters scrawled on the wall. He can’t decipher them, but Blackjack the Pig Farmer is versed in goblin, so he squeezes in, crawling over the others until he stands in Merric’s torchlight beside the engraved runes. He squints, reading them aloud:
“Bone slappers. Knee breakers. Skin rakers.”
“What’s that mean?” whispers Nari-lana.
“A goblin warning,” the scarred man replies. “Don’t go in here.”
The group doesn’t need to be told twice. It’s goblins they want, not vague warnings, and if the goblins aren’t going past that door then neither are they.
“The little bastards are known to have trouble keeping their minds focused,” Blackjack says. “I heard that sometimes they gotta use drums to keep—”
DOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.
DOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.
Somewhere in the depths drums begin, a deep rhythmic concussion that seeps through the rock from all directions. The goblins, obviously, know intruders are here.
They backtrack and continue down the east tunnel. It widens yet again, large enough for the humans to stand, and the heroes sigh. Wide tunnels are now getting scarier than small cramped tunnels.
They proceed very, very slowly, Merric and Douvan inspecting the walls, floor and ceiling every step at the way…and then Merric sees the goblin door. He pops it open, stretches east for about twenty feet and reaches a dead end…which is just another concealed goblin door. Very carefully he opens it and sees a small chamber rigged with a boulder, a metal sheet drum, and a closed wooden door. It is obviously another kind of warning system to make a loud sound, like the shrieker pit. Merric disables the trap and opens the door. There’s a long hallway bearing north, which probably intersects with the hallway they skipped earlier. Merric moves slowly down and finds another concealed pit of canvas and rocks. He cuts through it carefully, making sure to scrape any sand or rocks away first so they don’t fall on the shrieker below…but twenty feet down there are only hundreds of rusty spikes.
Nearby, Nari-lana and Jolen use the lantern light and find a wide stairwell leading down. A faint cool breeze wafts up. Rather than investigate the trapped tunnel Merric found, the group leaves that area to investigate the stairwell.
The stairs descend for twenty feet into inky darkness. Merric and Nari-lana go first, and soon see another T-junction, but on the far side an identical stairwell rises to the south. There is some water puddled on the floor, and the cool breeze emanates from the east. Furthermore, they hear a strange whistling and dripping from that same direction. A single set of goblin prints heads east.
Merric, Douvan and Jolen carefully walk that direction, the others hanging back a short distance and keeping an eye out. But Douvan has not proceeded very far when he hears a strange, liquid feminine voice in his head:
“HELP ME…”
He stops cold.
“HELP ME…”
Oh yes indeed, that is strange, and he tells the others. They decide to advance and see what lies at the end of the tunnel, and Douvan and Jolen are the first to reach the basin-shaped room:
Slick walls descend to a whistling wet hole where they hear wind gusting out of a shaft. A nature check reveals that that a lake or pond might be down there, judging from the echoing pings of water.
“Who’s down there?” asks Jolen. “Identify yourself!”
“HELP ME…” the odd voice says again, this time in both Jolen and Douvan’s mind.
But further down the tunnel, Nari-lana the genasi suddenly feels a vibration beneath her feet. The tunnel has begun shaking. And then she hears the dull roar…
“Something’s coming!” she shrieks. “RUN!”
[GM Note: I used the action music from Aliens here and a loud waterfall sound effect].
Everyone rolls initiative against the Wall of Water, and it is a black, amorphous thing, barreling toward them like a runaway train. [GM Note: It’s a post-edited water elemental miniature].
Nari-lana, Blackjack and Merric all barely manage to reach the south steps and clamber up mere seconds before the wall of water rips past their location, spraying them with icy liquid. But Douvan and Jolen were far behind, and upon seeing that they have no hope of reaching the stairwell, they try to anchor themselves as well as possible in the basin chamber.
The water blasts into the room, instantly sucking Jolen off his feet and swirling him around in around in a ferocious cycle as water begins draining down the wide hole. Douvan holds onto a stalagmite for dear life as frigid water closes over his head and buffets him from all sides, but he refuses to release his grip. Jolen is quickly sucked down the hole, flailing in freefall as hundreds of gallons of water pound onto his head and plunge him deep the beneath the surface of a underground lake. Cold water nearly steals all the breath from his lungs (sapping a Healing Surge) and then he’s fighting against his armor and gear that threaten to drown him.
He crawls along the bottom, finds a slight slope and pushes himself up, breaking the surface in an utterly dark room. He can barely draw a breath before he’s dragged down again, but finds some niches for his numbed fingers and pulls himself onto a small island of limestone rocks. He’s shivering head to toe and weakly rests his head there, unsure of what to do next and amazed that he is alive.
At the stairwell, Merric, Blackjack and Nari-lana watch the wall of black water without any idea what to do either. It’s impossible to get past it, so they decide to investigate where they are and pray that the river subsides soon enough for them to save their allies.
Merric scouts ahead and finds…surprise, surprise…more goblin tunnels. And around the corner is a tiny room that looks suspiciously dangerous:
Narrow walkways circumvent a pool of black water bristling with hundreds of rusty spikes. Merric detects concealed holes in the walls, probably large enough for spears or poles to push intruders into the pool while the goblins remain in relative safety. Great. He doesn’t cross the room.
Meanwhile, Douvan Stahl the ranger is making Strength check after Strength check, nearly a dozen in a row, but he finally fails. A solid minute of holding onto the stalagmite has sapped his reserves and he is ripped free and sucked down the whirlpool. Black water closes over his head, and then he too is bobbing and sputtering and clawing for purchase in an underground cavern.
While waiting, Jolen has cracked a sunrod, revealing an eerie chamber of greenish-blue rock formations, rippling clear water, and somewhere in the distance, an unnatural blue glow.
“COME TO ME…” whispers that same feminine voice in his head, louder and clearer than ever.
“Help!” Douvan gurgles, now floundering at the edge of the vertical plume of water. The lake is churning and frothing, and Jolen extends a hand to grab his ally and pull him to the small island. Shivering to the bone, they both collapse, wondering how in the hells they are going to escape from this predicament
Ten minutes after the ordeal started the river finally begins to subside. The current slows until it is just a trickle, and then nothing. Merric, Nari-lana and Blackjack think they hear gears clanking somewhere far, far down the west passage, but then it is silent.
On their little island, Jolen and Douvan struggle to stand, standing on precariously slick rock. To the south waits that eerie blue-green glow, and then something is suddenly standing in knee-deep water silhouetted against the backlight. It is goblin-sized, and it abruptly dives into the deep water of their chamber. It swims toward them, finally popping up a few scant feet away. It is a goblin, but unlike any they’ve ever seen. It has a purplish hue to its skin and vestigial gills on his neck. It watches them with wide white eyes.
“Be gone from here!” orders Jolen. “Leave this place or suffer!”
The goblin-fish-thing doesn’t answer, just blinks at them, and Jolen fulfills his promise. He calls down a burst of holy fire radiance on the goblin, burning its head instantly into a blackened cinder. The creature shrieks once and slides underwater, bubbling and smoking, but then suddenly the water EXPLODES in a small geyser of purple brains and blood. Douvan and Jolen stare at each other. That was…unexpected.
Meanwhile, Blackjack and Nari-lana have connected all their ropes and hooked them to Merric the Halfling. He sprints down the tunnel and navigates down to the fissure. The genasi and pig-farmer brace themselves in case the river returns, but they’re not sure if they will even have the strength to pull Merric back.
“Are you down there?” the Halfling shouts.
“Yes! We’re here! Get us out! Throw a rope! There are…these things down here with us!”
But it is a fifty foot drop from the lip of the hole to the icy lake below. Merric busies himself unraveling the last of his silk line to drop down, even as Jolen and Douvan hear more splashing. Merric sees them coming first in the radiant glow of the sunrod and the clear subterranean water: half a dozen goblin-fish-things angling toward the men on the island. They ready actions, and the first purple slime-covered goblin to pop up gets a face full of steel! It dies instantly, shuddering, but then its head violently erupts in a spray of wet brains and bone. Jolen and Douvan instantly feel psychic pain lance through their heads. Jolen bashes another as well, killing it, and again the thing’s head pops, damaging the cleric and ranger.
Slimy hands start grappling Douvan, trying to pull him off rock into the water.
“BRING THEM TO ME…” the eerie voice says in their minds.
Douvan and Jolen fight for their lives, not so much worried about the damage from the goblins, but from the aberrant thing that is controlling them. They definitely don’t want to meet it, but Jolen nevertheless sees a horrible picture in his mind’s eye, perhaps from mental contact with the thing. His brief impression is one of a horrible, huge, cruel catfish.
Merric targets a few goblinspawn with shirukens, but getting the rope into the water is first priority. The slimespawn keep pouring out of the adjacent chamber in larger and larger waves, most of them goblins, some of them other underground species. Jolen and Douvan fight them off with steel and spell, and Jolen ultimately calls upon a blessing of Tempus: a Spectral Warrior. It manifests beside him, a ghostly apparition that cannot be harmed or moved, and it begins hacking mercilessly at their foes.
Both men are thoroughly covered in mauve goo and slime, their heads aching from the continual psychic backlash of killing the slimespawn goblins at close range.
[GM Note: And the group agrees that fish-flavored goblins aren’t what Balthazar wants, so the search continues].
Douvan finally dives into the water and swims for the dangling rope. He starts clambering up, killing a goblin that gets too near, and seconds later Jolen is surging after him. Douvan is strong and makes excellent progress, and is soon halfway up the fifty foot ascent. Below, Jolen starts to climb, but loses his grip and falls back into the water, surrounded now on all sides by slimespawn.
Douvan makes it to the top with Merric, but there is blessed little they can do to help Jolen. The cleric wraps the rope around his waists, cinches it, and screams:
“Pull! By Tempus, pull!”
This begins a rigorous series of rolls as Blackjack, Nari-lana and the others try to haul Jolen from the grip of the slimespawn. But three goblins refuse to release him and they are all pulled out of the water, dangling back and forth as the Spectral Warrior kills what it can reach. One goblin clambers over Jolen and starts sawing at the rope with a sharp stone dagger.
“BRING HIM TO ME!” thunders the voice in Jolen’s head.
Jolen blasts the last of the goblins while his spectral warrior guards his escape,
and soon he is being hauled over the lip of the basin by his companions. “Out of here!” shouts Douvan. “Now!”
If the river trap is activated again they’ll be pounded back down the hole in worse shape than before.
The three heroes sprint back to the southern stairwell and run around the corner, breathing heavily. The river does not come, but whether through accident or design, they don’t know. For now they’re clumped at the top of the stairs, debating which direction to go, and wondering exactly where in the hells these cowardly goblins are hiding…
[GM Note: Good job guys. That river trap could have nabbed everyone, or no one, it really depended on luck. And running full tilt first chance you had. Sorry you got separated for such a long time, but at least you have an idea of what’s down there if you choose to return. It won’t be easy, regardless. Aboleths, even injured ones, are a-holes].
Picking up from last time, the heroes are clustered at the top of the stairs above the now empty river corridor. They have a few options available: head east and investigate the watery spiked trap room; head west down a wide, possibly trapped corridor, or go back to the river basin and confront the weird fish-goblin-things in the lake (and the aboleth the PCs know is there). First, they thoroughly search the immediate area for more goblin tunnels, and Merric takes a closer look at the spiked water pit. There are concealed murder holes at various heights along both walls, making it impossible to slink by on the ledges. He sees a dim light inside one hole, and after considerable discussion about how to cross the area, they finally decide against it. Too risky, and ultimately, they don’t know what’s around the corner. Maybe they’ll come back.
Douvan and Merric volunteer to check the river tunnel for goblin doors, provided that they’re tied off with ropes as a precaution. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a secret entrance that will lead to the cubby holes flanking the spiked water trap. They meticulously search down the corridor on both sides, and start following the western tunnel when they suddenly hear a distant grinding, clanking sound. Run! They flee back to the stairs and run up, and in seconds the black wall of water explodes down the tunnel again, spraying the group with cold froth, but they’re safe.
Well, there’s no going back until the river subsides, so they check the next tunnel. It branches south and continues west, both wide, ten foot tunnels that fill them with unease. Goblins like to trap the larger tunnels, but they don’t have any choice now. Merric slinks to the south, and the others check the walls and floors and ceilings, finding nothing. Everburning torch in hand, and Nari-lana carrying the supernova from the sunrod, Merric sees a long corridor and a pool of rippling black water along a wall. Nari-lana and Douvan advance, and the ranger peeks into the pool. It’s filled with fat albino fish that look harmless. This rectangular area is most likely a spawning pool.
But suddenly…TWANG!
An arrow zips past Merric’s head from a concealed slot on the wall, and Douvan sees that there are eight such concealed slots, each bristling with archers. Douvan runs down the hall and around the corner…and into a dead end. He immediately begins searching for a hidden door. Merric and Nari-lana run too, arrows zipping past them, and they also spin around the corner into the dead end. Soon the whole group is bunched up in the alcove, and they spend as long as they need pushing and prodding every square inch of the hall, and they find…absolutely nothing. They’ve walked into a simple trap, a dead end corridor with no choice but to run back past waiting archers. Although there IS an option…and Douvan decides to wade through the spawning pool.
Cold, blind fish bump against his legs as he sloshes through the water, and pressing close to the wall, the archers above him can barely target him. He reaches the far side and the others run past, taking a few hits, but are relatively unscathed.
They continue west and find the tunnel turns sharply south to a set of stairs leading down. They cautiously approach. At the bottom is an archway, but then three arrows zip out from concealed slots in the wall ahead of them! The party makes easy targets standing in the hallway, so Douvan is the first to run down the steps to the room below. At the threshold he stops and peers into the chamber, instantly wary of a new trap.
There is a closed wooden door on the far side of the room. In the ceiling are nine, evenly spaced square holes leading to a room above where the archers are located, still shooting down at his allies on the staircase. Douvan is too big to squeeze through the openings, but he wonders if the goblins can? They can surely fire down at anyone standing directly below the murder holes. He skirts along the side as the others come down the stairs, bunching in the threshold, safe from the sniper’s line of sight.
Merric follows Douvan to the door at the far side and they take a closer look. Built from solid wood and banded by iron, it has a black metal handle that opens inward. Merric licks his lips and checks the door for traps, poking at the frame and cracks and hinges with a thin thieving tool, but finds nothing. Above them, the party can see shadows shifting across the rectangular square holes. They hear wood scraping on metal. Everyone else is waiting for the rogue to open the door. So Merric finally opens it, and two things happen simultaneously.
First, there is only a blank rock wall behind the door, but there IS a trap that Merric failed to detect. It instantly triggers a hidden portcullis in the ceiling over the entrance to the room, and the gate crashes down on top of Jolen, the cleric of Tempus!
He’s pinned to the stone floor, blooding gushing from rusted spikes puncturing his midsection. He’s half in, half out of the chamber.
“Agh! HELP ME!”
The portcullis is extremely heavy, and Douvan rushes over to help pull it up. He and Merric are trapped inside, with Blackjack and Nari-lana on the stairwell, also trying to pull the gate off Jolen.
And that’s when the giant centipedes fall through the murder holes.
With a hard reddish carapace and clacking mandibles, the five-foot long centipedes instantly attack Merric and Douvan, while a few scuttle toward the cleric trapped under the portcullis. Jolen pales.
“You really, REALLY got to get this thing off me!”
Merric tries to dodge between them but is bitten and painful poison courses through his veins. Douvan, Jolen, Blackjack and Nari-lana are all trying desperately to get Jolen out of the trap but they fail again and again, and the portcullis continues inflicting damage as the heroes are surrounded by hungry centipedes.
Douvan abandons the gate and turns on the monsters with his blade. Blood is frothing at Jolen’s lips, and then he’s bitten by a centipede, poisoning him on top of his already excruciating pain. Nari-lana the sword finally uses an encounter power, teleports into the room, and BLASTS four of the centipedes to death at once. Smoke wafts from the tip of her sword as she wryly smiles. There’s only one beastie left at this point and Douvan quickly cuts it in half.
At last, after many, many rounds of failure, Blackjack manages to get the gate up and Jolen weakly crawls out.
The group heads back up the stairs, not sure where to go exactly, and that’s when they see the rat.
A single, (possibly) normal rat is clawing at the corner. It looks at the heroes, claws at the wall, looks back at them, keeps clawing some more…so Merric inspects the wall. Sure enough, there’s a concealed goblin door in a place they hadn’t looked. He pops it open and sees a twenty foot long tunnel that reaches a dead end, and probably another concealed door. Indeed it is, but before he goes in, Merric swaps out his torch with Nari-lana’s magic lantern. He returns to the tunnel, creeps through, and opens the other end. Another goblin tunnel stretches north and south into utter darkness. Merric steps inside, and about then he’s ambushed by two goblins with crossbows from opposite directions.
Bolts fly past his head and the goblins duck out of view.
Merric runs down the tunnel as Douvan squeezes in right behind him, realizing for the first time that fighting in these goblins tunnels is going to be very, very difficult. He’s moving half speed, -5 to attack, and grants Combat Advantage to the goblin sharpshooters, which it uses against the big human. A bolt skewers Douvan’s leg. Growling, the ranger chases the goblin, trying to knock it unconscious so they can start herding them up for Balthazar. That’s the plan now, to knock these guys out and take ten of them back to the wizard, but it’s a fairly long ways back to the entrance.
Merric brings the fight to the archers at the south, and these were the same guys sniping them from above the centipede trap room. The Halfling sees the nine squares holes in the floor and the cages from which the insects were dropped on their heads.
The fight is not particularly difficult, but the goblins are tenacious. The heroes are also trying to knock them unconscious using the flat of their blades, but there is still the danger of killing them accidentally. Eventually the little bastards are subdued, and one, cowering in the corner the whole time, screams for mercy. They’re tied up none too gently and thrown into the centipede cages for later retrieval. Blackjack is left to guard them.
The group inspects the rest of the area and finds a large room with a winch. There’s an iron grate in the floor that doesn’t open, but it lets them look down into the river tunnel. And behind the wall they hear the deep roar of a large, cold, black river. It was from here that the goblins diverted the current.
They also find four small jail cells, and to their surprise, there are two living creatures in them. One is an unconscious human female smeared with dirt who cannot be awakened, almost as if she has been drugged. And in the last cage…
“LEMME OUT TA ‘ERE!” screams a fat goblin, his pudgy yellow face pressed against the bars (and no, he’s not armed with a crossbow).
“Who are you?” asks Douvan, standing just outside the cage. The fat goblin wrinkles his nose.
“Balgron,” he answers in thickly accented Common tongue. “Now lemme out. Come on!”
“Why did they put you in this cage?”
The goblin’s nose wrinkles again, the gears in his little brain turning circles. “Eh, they not like me. Me new around here. Come from far away clan. Now me tell you, now you let me out, yes?”
“No,” grunts Merric.
“Aw, come on! I can help ya! Grishog will tear ya to pieces down here!”
“Who’s Grishog?”
“Leader of dese goblins. He not nice ta Balgron the Fat. Threw me in ‘ere.”
“Who’s the girl in the cage?”
“Dunno. Dey dump her in der not long ago.”
They don’t get much more info out of the Balgron, but they don’t let him out. Still screaming obscenities at them, they finish scouting out the tunnels and find a final peep hole at the end of a long, cramped tunnel. The peephole looks out over the river bed and the staircases. From here, the goblins could see who was coming and which direction the party went, and release the river accordingly. They weigh their options and decide to press on and find some more goblins.
They’re out there somewhere, drumming away in the darkness, and if the scale of these abandoned mines means anything, there could be hundreds more.
The heroes linger in the prison area, and after interrogating the fat goblin named Balgron (who continues begging for freedom) they turn to the female human prisoner. She is dirty and scantily clad in rags as if her clothes have been ripped away. She is barely conscious as well and seems to be under the influence of drugs. Eventually, with gentle coaxing and prodding, she is awakened and removed from the cell.
They find that her name is Raven, and she is a druidic follower of Chauntea the Earth Mother. She lives in the forest outside of Everlund, but just yesterday (she thinks it was yesterday, she’s not sure anymore) she was viciously attacked in her home by a squad of goblins of the Skull Cleaver tribe. Overwhelmed, she was subdued, blindfolded, and led into this dark, dank place. She remembers very little, other than that the goblins talked about sacrificing her to their dark god, Maglubiyet. She also remembers the stink of wet dog fur, wolves exactly. Many, many wolves, as she was led through some sort of den. After that she fell unconscious.
She has no idea where she is, or how to get out. Fortunately, when the goblins kidnapped her, they also razed her home and stole all of her belongings. The group finds her clothes and gear in the adjacent Winch Room. Ravenous, she accepts their offerings of dried fruit and water since the goblins had not exactly been the kindest of hosts. While she eats, the others explain what they’re doing here.
In short, a wizard named Balthazar has hired them to capture ten living goblins. Originally, the wizard said the goblins were part of a magical ritual where he turned them into pigs at the behest of the mayor of Everlund, Mayor Horace Burger. Balthazar’s assistant, the scarred pig-keeper Blackjack, has sneeringly told them otherwise.
Balthazar is a devious illusionist, and he is actually cooking the goblins into a stew and using the stew to magically subdue a local, bloodthirsty colony of bugbears. Because of their racial familiarity, the enchanted goblin stew can be bewitched to incite different emotions in their relatives, the bugbears. In this case, lethargy and hunger. [GM Note: I don’t know if you guys remember, but in the first adventure with the ogres and hill giant, they had some bugbear slaves on chains that were acting very strange]. Any leftovers are mixed with pig meat and sold to Burger’s Palace in Everlund, where the mildly addictive food is bringing in customers by the droves. Balthazar uses disguises to portray different people.
Between money paid by Mayor Horace for fixing the bugbear problem, and money made from Burger’s Palace, Balthazar has been raking in a large amount of gold every month. BUT…he needs many goblins to keep up the pace, and Blackjack failed this month to meet the quota.
The group has seen Balthazar in action and knows that he is a powerful adversary, so they rather not tangle with him. But ultimately they need to find proof of his activities and bring that information to Merple the Moneylender in Silverymoon…
…but right now they have bigger problems. This goblin warren which is turning out to be much larger than they originally thought and is riddled with deadly traps.
And about then, the deep, deep throb of DRUMS begins again. The goblins apparently haven’t forgotten about their presence.
“LEMME OUTTA HERE!” the fat goblin shouts, rattling the bars of his cage. “Grishog will tear ya to pieces!”
“And why should we let you out?” asks Nari-lana, but the goblin has no good answer. They leave him be to his ranting.
Altogether they have 5 goblins captured for Balthazar the wizard, including Balgron (Boss Fatty, who is more dangerous than he appears). The other four are locked up in the centipede cages above the portcullis room, and furthermore, the group has found a small goblin door leading southward from the tunnel. Merric volunteers to investigate.
He finds that the tunnel extends only twenty or thirty feet to a dead end wall. Two vertical slots are carved through the rock, and attached to the wall on either side of the tunnel rest two long gaff hooks. Light from the sunrod reveals a strange room on the other side of the slots. There is a large wooden cage to the left, dangling above a floor that Merric can’t see, although he hears sloshing water. The cage is big enough to fit five or six human-sized people, and it is attached to a rope and pulley system. It looks like the cage can be maneuvered across the room to an exit on the far side.
However, the two gaff hooks are exactly long enough to reach through the gaps in the wall to the rope and pulley.
After long deliberation, Merric surmises that he’s looking at a trap from the goblin’s perspective. There must be another way to reach the cage, and once victims are partway across, the goblins must reach out with the hooks and somehow cause the cage to fall.
And there’s something down there in the water, he can hear it sloshing about, but the angle of the little windows is insufficient to reveal the floor. For now, they decide to leave the room alone, but they have no idea how to get inside, or if it’s even necessary.
They discuss their options, realizing that they could have missed a secret door somewhere and will probably never find it. There is one door they skipped, a small goblin door with the engraved words “Head Takers, Skin Rakers, Knee Breakers…” a goblin warning for “Don’t Go In There!” They decided to leave it alone previously. If there are no goblins there, then it probably doesn’t lead anywhere useful.
That leaves just the watery spiked trap room with the narrow ledges, so that’s where they head next.
Crossing this chamber might be a problem though. Fortunately, the group finds that their new companion, Raven the Druid, has some excellent skills. With a click of her fingers, she instantly transforms into a rat and scampers across the narrow walkway to the far side. Any goblins watching through the murder holes ignore her passage.
She finds that the tunnel turns east and ends immediately, but there is a brick wall here, with a loose brick lying on the floor. Written on the wall in goblin are the words: “Head Takers, Skin Rakers. Knee Breakers.” Another warning. Her little mousy nose detects the whiff of fish, so scampering up the wall, she sits in the hole. She sees a natural cavern beyond, and a limestone staircase leading down into darkness and water. A cool breeze ruffles her fur.
There’s not much more she can do in rat form, so Raven transforms back to human. Well, the rest of the party needs to cross the water spike trap, so anchoring ropes at either end of the tunnel for hand support, Nari-lana the genasi swordmage goes first.
And, as suspected, the goblins jab spears out, giggling hideously the whole time. She is painfully impaled by five hits, but with support from the rope, the goblins can’t push her into the spikes. Douvan and Jolen cross next and are likewise stabbed repeatedly, but Merric and Blackjack are able to rush by relatively unscathed [GM Note: the group suffered about 50 total points of damage from the spears]. They search the entire short hallway but find no other exit, and no way to reach the enemies behind the walls. The only other option is to knock down the brick wall, so they begin hammering into it with a morning star.
Before long the bricks are bashed apart and they find themselves looking down into a natural cavern.
For Jolen the cleric and Douvan the ranger, this place feels eerily familiar. They were attacked by throngs of goblin-fish monsters in a cavern much like this one.
Apparently, the cavern descends beneath the river trap tunnel, and they suspect that it reaches the subterranean lake. Well, the party is at six members now, so they feel well equipped to handle whatever problems might emerge. They decide to investigate.
And that’s when Nari-lana, Jolen and Douvan all slip and tumble down the slick limestone stairs, piling atop each other at the bottom in a bruised heap in ankle-deep water. [That was hilarious].
They pick themselves up and look around. The cavern extends into a tunnel, but the frigid water gradually gets deeper and deeper. Soon they’re sloshing up to their thighs and Merric the Halfling has to leap on Douvan’s back. The bitterly cold water also forces Endurance checks that could have sapped Douvan and Jolen’s final Healing Surge, but everyone manages to endure the pain and press onward.
And then they see the blue glow.
Jolen and Douvan saw it before, when they were being attacked by the fishy goblins under the Basin room. They advance very, very carefully, listening to the sound of sloshing water as something besides them is moving out there. And turning the corner around a clump of stalagmites, Nari-lana sees something hideous.
Across the expanse of a wide, shallow lake sits a huge, slimy monster on top of a rock. Membranous organs flutters under a translucent, slimy cocoon, and several of the purple-skinned goblins stand guard nearby.
“What…in the Nine Hells is THAT?” the genasi mutters, but six failed Dungeoneering checks later do not reveal the monster’s nature. They’ve never seen or heard of anything like it. It continues watching them with three unblinking red eyes, and then the feminine voice speaks in all their heads:
“COME TO ME.”
Well, the group isn’t exactly keen on getting transformed into slimespawn, but they inch closer, skirting the wall and looking for a way around the monster without getting too close. The goblinspawn continue watching them without moving, almost surely following telepathic orders.
And then twelve more creatures simultaneously appear, their heads and eyes rising in unison from the water depths to stare at the party.
“JOIN ME. COME…MY CHILDREN. TO SHAR-SHAZALUK.”
Again, the telepathic voice in their heads. The group is now about thirty feet from the monster, and neither it nor the goblinspawn have moved. Then Nari-lana sees that there are five more goblinspawn waiting on a rock ahead of them. They’ll have enemies practically all around them if they keep going. They whisper among themselves and decide to fall back and start launching ranged attacks from where they first entered this chamber.
They retreat about 1 foot when every creature in the room attacks them simultaneously.
The goblin slimespawn launch into motion, fluidly jetting through the water while the slimy abomination, their “mother” Shar-shazaluk, bombards each member of the party with painful psychic energy. The results are crippling.
Nari-lana is Stunned, reeling from agony, and cannot move at all. Raven and Douvan are Immobilized, their legs locking up. Merric is overwhelmed by debilitating nausea and begins puking into the water, and Jolen the priest is Blinded, a purple film coating his eyes. Only Blackjack escapes unscathed.
The slimespawn, an eclectic mixture of goblins, lizardmen and other subterranean races, swarm around the heroes, biting, clawing and stabbing with crude stone daggers. One of them is larger than all the rest, a hulking brute with the scaly head of a fish that savages the helpless Nari-lana with its talons. And then there are the goblinspawn who’s heads violently erupt when slain, yet another problem to contend with.
“We got to get out of here!” shouts Douvan, but that’s easier said than done. The slimespawn die easily enough, falling under sword and arrows, but their mother Shar-shazaluk endlessly hits the group again and again and again with her psychic barrage, crippling their movement and stacking debilitating effects round after round.
Raven the druid casts Icy Wind, and finds that this is possibly the most useful thing she could have done (and it’s an At-Will). The gusting, bitter wind slides the minions away one square, a split second before the latent psychic energy in their brains explodes in a gory bloom of purple blood and bone.
Jolen is overwhelmed by a psychic order that makes him swing wildly at Raven, but she assumes it was a mistakes because he’s still blind (and was blind most of the encounter).
Things begin to look very grim for the heroes, and for a while there they suspect that Blackjack the Pig Farmer might be the only survivor of Tallow’s Deep [“Sorry Boss, those guys weren’t so good after all!”]. This is reinforced when the psychic barrage overwhelms Merric, and he sees an unholy beast explode from the water in front of him!
It’s a full grown, healthy aboleth (well, the Slime Monster, as they know it), its tentacles lashing and groping, and the halfing is immobilized by terror. Oddly enough, no one else sees the thing surge up. Blubbering to himself, Merric can do nothing but gape in fear at the abomination as it rushes toward him. But soon it vanishes, and Merric realizes with relief that it was just an illusion.
But the group has slowly managed to edge away from the beast, and they discover that there is a range limit to the aboleth’s power, although the exact line is nebulous. But Nari-lana has made no progress at all, hampered by terrible conditions for the entire fight and Stunned practically six rounds in a row and taking continual damage. [GM Note – Stunned is an ass kicker of a condition, one I would use very, very sparingly].
But bit by bit, the group has consistently whittled down the slimespawn. Dead bodies bob in the cold water, and Douvan makes consistent arrow attacks from his perch on a rock, adding more corpses to the fray.
But the vile aboleth is completely unharmed and still using her psionic powers with impunity. The fishman attacking Nari-lana enters a terrible rage, and it is not a minion like its brethren. Horrid claws rake down the swordmage’s body, but her allies concentrate attacks on the thing and it is finally vanquished, sinking under the water with a dying wet gurgle.
Jolen is overcome by a vision of himself drowning to death in purple mucous, so real and disturbing that he suffers -4 to all Defenses until he can banish the thought from his mind. And then he sees the huge aboleth explode from the water, and he sinks down, worshipping its magnificence. There is no point resisting their incredible might…
The heroes finally manage to reach the bend in the cavern and safety from the psychic assault. The minions are all slain, their corpses littering the cavern, but Shar-shazaluk is still alive and well and…communicating.
“JOIN ME…” her voice whispers in the minds. “RETURN TO ME…”
The heroes answer with a retaliatory hail of arrows and spells. Flame, they find, is not very useful against the wet, rubbery membrane, but the monster does not have the capability to move. In fact, the only movement they’ve seen from it at all is the involuntary flexing and pulsing of its internal organs. [GM Note – This is going to put a little dent in your arrow reserves].
But the aboleth can do nothing without her minions to protect her. Spell and steel sink into her cold alien flesh, and after a long time, the thing is finally destroyed. Her voice ceases to speak in their minds and viscera squirts from uncountable wounds.
The party cautiously advances, sloshing through the frigid water and crawl atop her stony island, wary of a surprise attack. But no, Shar-shazaluk is slain, and upon closer inspection, it looks like something else tried to kill her already.
The aboleth’s tail has had a huge bite ripped out of it, the wounds still fresh and raw. A tentacle is missing, bitten off half way, and huge claws have raked her side, rending the gills and ribcage. In fact, it looks like the aboleth was trying to regenerate the grievous damage, hence its immobile state.
They don’t see any treasure, but with growing despair, they realize that something even worse than the Slime Monster might be lurking in the dark down here. They search around briefly, finding the Basin room where Jolen and Douvan were originally dumped. There are also two small streams that flow out, leading down, down, down into ever greater gloom…
And there we stopped. [GM Note – Level up to 5th next time we play guys. You’re severely wounded and I don’t know if you want to risk pressing on or not, but there are not many safe places around here to rest for 6 hours. On the other hand, the goblins probably won’t come into this cave looking for you].
The heroes, newly advanced to 5th level, are ensconced in the cavern beneath the goblin warren of Tallow’s Deep. The aboleth is slain, her dark blood spurting into the frigid water even now, and as noticed last time, the aboleth bore grievous wounds before the party had a go at her. A few tentacles are chomped off, the flesh rent by claws, and vicious teeth marks visible on the tail. Other dead bodies bob in the water, the last of Shar-shazaluk’s foul children, but the party isn’t concerned about them.
Something else nearly killed the aboleth, and that something is possibly still down here.
They slosh through the cold, knee-deep water, gaining their bearings. There appears to be two exits from this chamber, a rocky, slippery stream that curves away into darkness, and beyond where the aboleth recuperated, another trickling stream splashes away into gloom. Other than that, the only exit is the Basin Room nearby, where Jolen and Douvan were first flushed away by the river trap, but reaching the top of that without a rope will be nearly impossible [except, as we noted, in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition, by fifth level it would have been easy to fly up there].
The party is severely low on resources and health. Jolen and Douvan have no surges left at all, while the others have just a few in reserve. But time is of the essence. Balthazar the magician is waiting for them to return with 10 living goblins, the requisite ingredient for the complacent bugbear stew and the Burger’s Palace menu, and if they have any intention of meeting the curfew – today – then they have to hurry.
After some discussion they decide to press on. The tunnel to the west warrants investigation, so Merric and Douvan navigate the hazardous descent while the others guard the top. The halfing and ranger tie themselves off with rope and take the enchanted lantern with them, comforted by its halo of warm light.
And Merric is glad for that light, for what it reveals at the bottom of slippery chute is alarming. He and Douvan hunker down in silence, watching an unnaturally large turtle residing on a small rocky island.
It is huge, and unmoving, and neither Douvan nor Merric want to risk upsetting it. However, the lantern light has not disturbed it so far, and Merric fails to discern anything else unusual about the beast. For now, the duo decides to return the top and search the other watery avenue. They climb back up and tread down the opposite passage, but this one ends in a sheer plunge off a cascading narrow waterfall. The light from the floating lantern only extends to fifty feet, and water is echoing off rocks somewhere past that. Falling from here could be disastrous, and they decide not to search any further.
Back to the turtle then.
Douvan and Merric find that it has still not moved, and risking its ire, Douvan takes aim with his bow and sends an arrow into the thing’s hindquarter. It doesn’t flinch. Encouraged by this, they swim out to the adjacent island for a closer look. The water here is very deep and clear, and they can see the rocky bottom of the chamber. But upon closer inspection, Douvan can easily tell that this is no normal turtle, not even an abnormally huge one, but a much more dangerous beast altogether – a dragon turtle.
And it is undoubtedly dead.
Slime covers the corpse, and they can see jellied brains leaking from its nose. It seems as if the aboleth and dragon turtle had a bitter disagreement, perhaps over whose lair this belonged to, with the aboleth barely emerging as the victor. But then the precious glint of gold catches Merric’s eye. Scattered underwater are numerous coins, so they send the enchanted lantern straight down. The resultant illumination reveals many, many more coins, and a hidden shelf and cave beneath the island where the dragon turtle lies.
They inform the others, but neither Merric nor Douvan want to swim down there. Douvan is in bad shape, and the cold could very well fatally sap the strength from his bones. But Raven the druid has a Water Walking ritual that she agrees to cast on Nari-lana the sword mage, so she hastily gathers the components and begins the spell.
The genasi is in decent shape, and strong enough to swim down and gather the gold. Ten minutes later the ritual is cast, and taking a deep breath, Nari-lana dives into the chilled lake.
She now sees that the cave stretches well beneath the rocky ledge, and there are easily a thousand gold coins stuffed into the crevasse. But even more enticing, she sees a number of odd items placed against the wall, including a bright silver sword, and these are the first things she hauls to the surface.
All in all they find a sunsword, several potions of healing, a bag of holding and slippers of spider climbing and two enchanted bracers, and a mysterious potion with a feather in it, adorned by an elvish label that no one can read. This last potion also bears the illustration of a pair of feet with tiny wings sprouting from the ankles. Raven casts another ritual, Comprehend Languages, and deciphers the words: Year of the Pegasus. That doesn’t mean much to anyone except Jolen, who upon wracking his memory of ancient history recalls that date…as being nearly 400 years old. Long, long before the Spell Plague haunted Faerun.
A potion 400 years old could very well be spoiled, or not work at all, or have side effects, but after some more inspection they verify that this is indeed a powerful Potion of Flying.
While Nari-lana is retrieving the loot, Douvan busies himself with removing the shell from the dragon turtle. They have a plan for it – there is a very, very dangerous corridor they must navigate again, the spiked water trap, and they think the large turtle shell will help them bypass it. So the ranger puts his taxidermy skills to the test, cutting into the flesh and tendons of the dead dragon and stripping away the heavy armored shell.
Eventually all of the gold is scooped up and deposited in the newly acquired Bag of Holding, filling it to the brim, and the group contemplates their next move. They have two options: retrieve the five goblins captured upstairs and take them to Balthazar, or keep searching for five more to reach the quota. Ultimately they decide to just take what they have and get the hell out of this miserable place. Blackjack accepts this, although he warns them that Balthazar will be displeased, but the wizard also didn’t know this domain was a hotbed of goblin deathtraps. Not that he would have cared.
They backtrack to the limestone stairway which caused them considerable trouble last time, but Merric easily ascends on the return trip and he drops a rope to assist the others. They tie ropes around the heavy dragon shell to haul it to the top, and then the heroes try to climb the slippery slope. They fall several times, but are eventually able to reach the top without too much difficulty. The shell is pulled up after them, and thrown squarely into the middle of the spike trap. One by one they leap into the newly excavated shell, scuttle across, and jump the remaining distance to the far side of the pit. Everyone succeeds, and unlike last time, they suffer no horrible damage from snipers behind the walls.
And then Merric spots a flicker of movement gone in a heartbeat.
He nudges Jolen, and the group immediately sends the floating magic lantern ahead. And then Jolen hears a very faint CLICK. A trap? They’re not sure, but they advance and turn the corner to the room with the spawning pool and albino fish. They thought they had thoroughly searched here before, but a new hunt reveals a tiny portion of wall they inadvertently skipped last time – and a hidden goblin door.
This is Merric’s job, scouting out the cramped tunnels, so grasping his daggers, he gently pops the door open. But it is not a goblin tunnel on the other side but rather a ten foot wide tunnel where his human-sized friends can easily stand. But seconds after they have all entered they see a scummy goblin peeking around the corner of another goblin tunnel!
The little monster squeals and runs, but the heroes don’t blinding charge after it. The tunnel forks up here, and Merric cautiously peeks around the east branch. The little bastards have the tendency of leading them into traps.
The tunnel bends southward, and Merric, Douvan and Nari-lana decide to investigate while the others guard their backs. Thirty feet later the tunnel widens again, revealing a shallowly inclined tunnel with a closed wooden door at the base. But still no goblin. Nor did any of them hear the door open and close. Merric takes a step closer, and that’s when he notices the thin sheen of oil – and some other strange substance – on the floor. This whole tunnel stinks of a trap now, but they decide to search the walls in their immediate vicinity, and are rewarded with yet another clever goblin door. Indeed, this entire complex is riddled with the damnable things, a huge snaking network of hidden doors, booby traps and secret tunnels.
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