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<blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 6114096" data-attributes="member: 508"><p><strong>ADVENTURE 64 - THE LOCKPICK DUNGEONS</strong></p><p></p><p>PC Roster:<p style="margin-left: 20px">Akari, tiefling paladin of Hieroneous</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"> Feron Dru, half-elf druid</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"> Galrich Slayer, half-orc barbarian</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"> Rale Bodkin, human rogue</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"> Thunderwolf, human fighter</p><p></p><p>NPC Roster:<p style="margin-left: 20px">Aerik Battershield, dwarven fighter</p><p></p><p>"Let me see that thing," commanded Feron. Rale, tired of playing with the foolish item and having gotten nowhere with it, handed it over without a fuss.</p><p></p><p>Feron turned the oversized key around, studying the way the letters lined up on the wheels that circled the shaft. There were eight such wheels, each containing five letters in the Common alphabet. Obviously, it was some sort of elaborate word puzzle, and Feron usually excelled at those. Part of the problem, she decided, was that she couldn't see all of the letters at once. Getting out a sheet of parchment, she carefully inscribed each of the letters from each wheel. Looking over her work, she saw the following:"Look at the three blank spaces," Feron said. "Those must be word breaks. So we have a series of words, up to eight letters long, with some blanks filling in where more than one word shows up on the same line."</p><p></p><p>"Try 'COMMAND WORD,'" suggested Akari. "These things always start out with 'COMMAND WORD.'"</p><p></p><p>"Hmm," mused Feron. "There's no 'C' in either of the first two columns. It's not 'COMMAND WORD.'"</p><p></p><p>Galrich peeked over Feron's shoulder as she puzzled over the letters. "Hey, that spells 'PIE,'" he pointed out, proud of his newly-learned ability to read and write. "And that there says, 'PORK.'"</p><p></p><p>"It's <em>all</em> got to say something," Feron said. She shuffled a couple of the wheels around, then looked back at her parchment. "I think the easiest way to figure this out is to concentrate on those blanks. Look at this one," she said, pointing to the blank in the fourth column. "That means the word in front of the blank can only have three letters. So what do we have? 'EVE?' 'DOE?' 'TOE?' 'DUO?' 'DUE?'" she mused aloud, scribbling the possibilities in the margins of her parchment.</p><p></p><p>"How about 'TO?'" asked Rale.</p><p></p><p>"Yeah, 'TOO' fits," affirmed Feron, adding it to her list of three-letter words.</p><p></p><p>"No, with only one 'O,'" replied Rale, taking the key back from her and reconfiguring the wheels. "Blank, T, O, blank." The key now read:"Hey, that second line could be 'LOCKPICK,'" said Rale, flipping the wheels into position. For his trouble, he got:"That doesn't make any sense," Rale complained to himself.</p><p></p><p>"There are two 'Ps' on that fifth wheel," pointed out Akari, flipping the other 'P' into place, and reading what was thus formed. 'TO THE LOCKPICK DUNGEONS TELEPORT EVERYONE.' Oh, wait, start here: 'TELEPORT EVERYONE TO THE LOCKPICK DUNGEONS.'"</p><p></p><p>The command phrase haven been spoken aloud, the key did just that: it teleported everyone to the Lockpick Dungeons.</p><p></p><p>The six heroes suddenly found themselves in a room filled with inky darkness. "Sonuva--" sputtered Rale. "Way to go, Akari! How about next time, we don't activate the command word until we're all ready to go?"</p><p></p><p>"Uh, sorry about that," replied Akari sheepishly, as he opened up his haversack and started breaking out sun rods and passing them around.</p><p></p><p>The group was in a large, rectangular room with six closed stone doors. Each of the doors had two lines of letters carved on them, as follows:In the center of the room were two concentric circular slabs of stone, each about a foot thick, pierced in their centers by a thick upright column of stone. All along the edges of the stone circles, evenly spaced, were the 26 letters of the Common alphabet, only the bottom circle had the alphabet running clockwise, and the smaller circle above it had the alphabet going counter-clockwise.</p><p></p><p>Rale began by examining each of the stone doors. Since there were no knobs, handles, or hinges in sight, he surmised that these were the type of door that had a central column at top and bottom, which allowed the door to pivot when pushed on either side. He started with the first door, and pushed on both sides in turn, but it didn't budge. It did have a keyhole, though, and while the keyhole didn't go all the way through to the other side of the door to let him peek through, it did allow a means by which the door might be opened. Rale unpacked his lockpicks and went to work, noticing as he did so that there was an odd lilac perfume emanating from the door.</p><p></p><p>Feron looked at the letter wheels in the middle of the chamber and at the letters engraved on the doors. While Rale worked at opening the first door, she wandered over to the second and tried pushing it open on the right side. That turned out to be a bad idea, as it blasted her with a beam of frigid energy as soon as she had touched it. She backed off, and scraped a layer of frost from her armor, face, and hands, shivering all the while.</p><p></p><p>"Why don't you let me handle the doors?" asked Rale, looking up from his efforts at the first door.</p><p></p><p>Feron just glared at the rogue and wandered back over to the twin circles. "I'll bet it's a combination lock of sorts," she said, looking at the letters on the third door. "'L, I, Z, M,'" she read, twisting the top stone circle so that the "A" inscribed on the bottom circle lined up with each of the four letters in turn. "That should do it," she announced, and then strode up purposefully to the third door. But then, after a moment's hesitation, she decided she didn't trust her solution enough to want to be the one to test out her theory; Akari gallantly stepped up in her place and gave the side of the stone door a shove. It didn't budge - but it did send a blast of fire that covered him from head to toe. With a cry of surprise, he backed away, glad to note that as a tiefling he was able to shrug off a small bit of the fire's effects.</p><p></p><p>"I guess that's not the secret," winced Feron, and checked to see that Akari was okay.</p><p></p><p>"Got it!" announced Rale, stepping back from the first door, putting his lockpicks away, and then pushing up against the right side. The door was heavy, but it swiveled on its central axis with a grinding sound. Unfortunately, it led only to a short stone corridor, at the end of which was another door.</p><p></p><p>"I'll check it out," offered Galrich, but Rale held him back with a raised hand. "Let me examine it first," he recommended, and the half-orc stepped back, waiting impatiently as Rale gave the whole area a quick inspection.</p><p></p><p>"I think it's trapped," he announced after about half a minute, during which he did nothing but swing his sun rod in various directions. "Let's try a different door."</p><p></p><p>"What makes you say that?" demanded Galrich. "I don't see any traps."</p><p></p><p>"Look closely at the floor," replied Rale. "You can see a crack going the whole length of the floor, all the way to the opposite door. I'd bet anything that the floor hinges open, and drops us into a pit below or something."</p><p></p><p>"It smells nice, though," pointed out Feron, who had wandered open to see what Rale had found. "Lilacs."</p><p></p><p>"Yeah, no idea about that," admitted Rale. "Which door should we try next?"</p><p></p><p>"There's got to be a reason for those letters on the doors," said Feron. She turned to Rale and asked, "Is there such a thing as a combination lock for a door like these?"</p><p></p><p>"Sure, it's possible," said Rale. "Pick a door, and we'll give it a try."</p><p></p><p>Feron opted for the sixth door, and painstaking lined up the stone dials so the "A" on the bottom wheel lined up with the "P," "W," "K," and "Y" in turn. "That should do it..." she said, with a glimmer of doubt in her voice.</p><p></p><p>Galrich, bored by now, offered to push it open, but it wouldn't budge. However, it didn't zap him either, which Feron chose to take as a good sign. Rale applied himself to the task of picking the lock through the keyhole, while the others stood around him holding up their sun rods to give him proper illumination by which to work his magic. Feron was back to examining the stone circles, sure she was missing something.</p><p></p><p>Rale successfully opened the lock on the sixth door, and stood back as Galrich pushed it open. Just like the first door, this one led to a short corridor with another door at the far end; this time, Galrich anticipated Rale's warning and stepped back after having opened the door, so that Rale could check it out first. Aerik nodded in appreciation of his liege's uncommon sensibility, for once.</p><p></p><p>Rale checked the floor, the intersections between the floor and walls and between the walls and ceiling, and professed them to be safe enough to enter. He stepped into the short corridor, checking his surroundings before advancing, and finally approached the far door. "Another trap," he announced. "There's a rune hidden here at the top of the door; looks like it's triggered to go off as soon as anybody touches this door."</p><p></p><p>"Then I vote we don't touch this door," piped up Akari. The others agreed - and then spun frantically in place at the sound of Feron's shriek, then raced back into the central chamber to find out what fate had befallen the druid.</p><p></p><p>But Feron was fine - in fact, she was grinning from ear to ear. "We've been concentrating on the wrong letters!" she announced happily. "Look at the top rows on all of the doors: they only have two letters, 'I' and 'V.' Watch what happens when I line the 'I' on top with the 'I' on the bottom: the 'V' on top lines up with the 'V' on the bottom!"</p><p></p><p>"So?" Rale demanded.</p><p></p><p>"So read me those letters on that door you just opened," she commanded. As Rale did so, she called out the corresponding letters on the other letter wheel now that they were lined up properly. "'B-U-G-S' - bugs! I'll bet the trap summons a swarm of bugs of some type!" Using the same technique, Feron discovered that the first door was marked with "ACID" in code, which no doubt explained the scent of lilacs: a permanent olfactory illusion to cover the stringent scent of the pool of acid waiting just below the floor trap. Doors two and three were coded for "COLD" and "FIRE" respectively, which made sense, as Feron and Akari had discovered on their own. The fourth door was marked "HARM" and the fifth "SAFE," so Door Five it was.</p><p></p><p>It was locked, but it didn't hold up to Rale's lockpicking abilities any better than Doors One and Six had, and before too long the group was through the door and heading down a flight of stairs that bent to the right and opened into another large chamber. This one had two passageways flanked by pillars, with a carved message of some type between the doors. Rale led the way, checking for traps, and read the engraved message.Looking down the corridors without actually entering them, Rale saw each was another short passageway with a door at the end. He had already learned that that particular configuration was not necessarily to be trusted, here in the Lockpick Dungeons, and gave a close scrutiny to each. After he had determined that the floor of the corridor on the left didn't look to be attached to the walls of that corridor, Akari called out from behind him that he'd found a secret door. It was on the wall to the side of the stairs by which the group had entered. Not trusting the obvious exits from the room, Rale decided to give the secret passageway a try. He led the way, checking for traps every couple of feet, to the obvious exasperation of Galrich, who just wanted to <em>get on with it!</em></p><p></p><p>The secret passage curved around and opened into another room, judging from the door placement the room on the other side of the two short corridors. However, there was a door to the north which corresponded with the door of the leftmost corridor, whereas the short corridor to the right apparently ended up at a false door, for there was no corresponding door in this room. There was another door to the south, this one much larger than the others. Akari and Rale stepped up to examine it. It, too, had letters engraved upon it. They read:"Great, another word puzzle," complained Rale. "Whoever built this place was obviously a puzzle junkie."</p><p></p><p>The group crowded around the letters, and Akari was the first to point out that the letters for the words "COMMAND WORD" - well, all except for the final "D" - could be found in the top two rows. After a moment's scrutiny, he saw that the two-word phrase could be figured out by bumping up and down along the top two rows, then bouncing back the way he'd come, dropping down to the next two rows, and completing the process. "'COMMAND WORD TO OPEN THE DOOR IS MORD," he read aloud.</p><p></p><p>Immediately upon saying the word "Mord," the large door raised up into the wall, revealing a small room inside. Rale gave it a quick perusal while standing outside the now-open door, and announced that he didn't see anything overtly traplike. He and Akari stepped into the small room to give it a more thorough inspection. After about a half-minute, the door suddenly swung closed again, trapping the two inside. Before they had an opportunity to do anything, the entire room plummeted down a corkscrewed shaft, spinning counterclockwise as it did so. At the end of the twisted shaft, the door opened, the whole room tipped forward, and the two adventurers were pitched unceremoniously into the room just beyond. As they spilled into a heap, they could hear the door closing behind them and the elevator room rising back up to the upper level.</p><p></p><p>On that upper level, Feron and the others were trying to find a way to open the now-shut door, as the command word was no longer working. As they pounded fruitlessly on the door, there was a sudden grinding noise behind them, and they turned to see a young elven woman in leather armor, wearing a short sword belted at her hip, emerging from another secret passageway across the room from them. "Oh!" she exclaimed in surprise. "Hello! My name is <strong>Jhazmina</strong>. I assume you guys got here the same way I did?" And with that, she held up an identical copy of the magical key that Akari had been holding when the whole group got teleported to the Lockpick Dungeons. Feron immediately distrusted this sudden newcomer; perhaps she'd been hanging around Rale too long? "Keep your distance," she warned, her hand on the hilt of her scimitar. "Just where did you come from?" she demanded.</p><p></p><p>"A small town called Riverton," Jhazmina replied. "I found this key in a chest filled with--oh, you mean right now!" She nodded to the secret passage in the stone wall behind her. "There's a secret door back here. It leads to a small pile of armor and weapons, none of the type that I can use, but there's a suit of armor that might fit the dwarf. C'mon, I'll show you!" And with that, she turned back to the crack in the wall and opened it further, revealing another pivoting door.</p><p></p><p>"Hold," commanded Galrich to his dwarven bodyguard, oblivious to the fact that Aerik hadn't budged an inch from where he was standing. In fact, Aerik had his dwarven greataxe at the ready, in case this elven lass had treachery in her heart.</p><p></p><p>"Goodness, you're a twitchy bunch," Jhazmina observed, after noticing that nobody was moving to follow her to the treasure she had unearthed. "Okay, suit yourselves. I couldn't tell if any of the stuff was magical, but it did look to be in pretty good condition." Thunderwolf, a bit embarrassed about how the group was treating this pretty young elf, stepped up and introduced himself, but was then pulled back by Feron. "Keep your distance," commanded Feron. "We don't know anything about her."</p><p></p><p>Meanwhile, down below, Rale and Akari picked themselves up from the floor and looked around at their new surroundings. They were in a smallish room, with a floor covered in alternating squares of white and black, like a chessboard. There was a mist rising up from the floor, quickly covering the lower half of the room, making it difficult to see - but before the <em>obscuring mist</em> effect fully took hold, they saw a closed door across the room and a disturbingly familiar shadowy object floating around the far corner of the room. It bobbed and turned to face them, eyestalks twisting to point in their direction as it did so.</p><p></p><p>"Down!" shouted Rale as he dove to the ground, hiding in the mist. Akari, in his full plate armor, wasn't as quick to make it prone, but managed to do so just as a beam of energy flashed over his head. "Beholder!" he yelled, as Rale crouched behind the armor-clad paladin for protection.</p><p></p><p>"Let's split up," suggested Rale in a whisper. "We'll take him from both sides."</p><p></p><p>"Bad idea," argued Akari, just as quietly. "If we stick together, it should only have three eyestalks capable of aiming at us at any one time. If we split up, we each get three pointed at us." As if to help make his point, another beam blasted directly over their heads.</p><p></p><p>"Okay, fine," hissed Rale. "You go first, I'll be right behind you." Akari looked back at his companion, unsure if the rogue actually meant it or was simply trying to get the paladin to go do all of the fighting. Either way, he turned back in the direction of the beholder and started creeping up to it, as quietly as he could. Then, when it was once again in his sight, he sprang up and swung <em>Hoardmaster</em> into it with all of his might. Surprisingly, his single swing cut the floating beast in twain, and it exploded into his face in an eruption of spores. Too late, Akari realized he had not been in valiant combat with a beholder, but rather with a gas spore - and the <em>obscuring mist</em> and illusions of flashing beams of energy had only reinforced the charade. Fortunately, Akari's tiefling constitution was able to shrug off the effects of the spores, and after a brief fit of coughing he was ready to move on. Rale moved on with him now that the danger was over, and together they found their way over to door across the way. It was locked, and Rale started in on it with his lockpicks.</p><p></p><p>"Shouldn't we go back for the others?" asked Akari.</p><p></p><p>"They saw what happened to us," responded Rale. "I imagine they should be right behind us."</p><p></p><p>By then, the elevator room had risen back up to the upper level and Feron discovered that repeating the command word "Mord" was working once again - apparently it was a fail-safe, to prevent one from opening the door to an empty shaft. "Door's open, guys!" she said, looking over her shoulder at the empty room behind her, and the wide-open secret door that Jhazmina had used.</p><p></p><p>"Idiots!" she hissed between her teeth as she poked her head through the secret door, which turned a corner and led to a short set of stairs. Sure enough, Jhazmina was down at the bottom, about to turn the corner to the right, with Thunderwolf behind her and Galrich and Aerik behind him. At least Aerik had the good sense to be shaking his head, as if he was sure this wasn't a good idea.</p><p></p><p>He was right. Jhazmina popped back around the corner and aimed a wand at the group conveniently bunched up in a straight line along the narrow steps. Feron was quick enough to anticipate what was coming and dodged back around the corner up at the top of the stairs, and thus avoided the <em>lightning bolt</em> Jhazmina sent flying up the stairwell. Cries of pain from her comrades illicited nothing more than a quick thought of <em>It serves you idiots right!</em> from an angered Feron.</p><p></p><p>Thunderwolf, the first in line on the stairs, swung Xanthros at the nimble elf, but she dodged below his swing and crossed over to the left side of the cross-corridor at the bottom of the stairs, kicking open a barricade from a hidden door and swinging down through it in a single move. Thunderwolf and the others raced after her, pulling the door open and poking their heads in - and then pulled them right back out again and slammed the door back shut.</p><p></p><p>"What's back there?" called down Feron from the top of the stairs.</p><p></p><p>"Gelatinous cube," replied Galrich.</p><p></p><p>"Did it get her?"</p><p></p><p>"No such luck," replied the half-orc. "She scampered up the wall on the other side. She must have been wearing boots like you've got." Here he was referring to Feron's <em>boots of spider climbing</em>, which had been put to good use on many an adventure. Feron tried visualizing the layout of the Lockpick Dungeons as she understood them, and realized that the gelatinous cube would almost certainly have been directly underneath the leftmost corridor from the room which offered two different hallways to traverse - both of them apparently trapped. "So have you had enough fun down there, ignoring my suggestions not to trust strangers you meet in a dungeon?"</p><p></p><p>"Yes, Feron," replied Thunderwolf sheepishly, and began trudging back up the stairs. Aerik took a moment to check out the small pile of treasure that Jhazmina had referred to to lure them all down there, and sure enough, there <em>was</em> a small pile of weapons and armor down there, even including a suit of dwarven half-plate and a dwarven battleaxe. Aerik passed on the armor, preferring his own, but he picked up the battleaxe as a backup weapon, and some further poking around discovered a magical dagger and a few potions, which were distributed among the group.</p><p></p><p>Eventually, though, Feron managed to herd the group into the elevator room, which had been waiting patiently for them. They stood inside the room waiting for something to happen, and after about 30 seconds the room plunged down the corkscrewing shaft as it had before, dumping them into a heap into a room filled with mist as it had earlier done to Akari and Rale. However, they could hear sounds of battle coming from the far side of the room, so they got to their feet and headed in that direction.</p><p></p><p>In the other room, Rale had managed to open the lock and enter the room and he found it remarkably like the room he and Akari had just left: same size, same black and while tiles on the floor, same beholder levitating in the far corner of the room. In fact, the only differences seemed to be that there were two additional doors leading out of this room, the tiles didn't seem to activate any illusion spells, and the beholder was very much a beholder, angered at the intrusion. It blasted the two with eye rays when it wasn't covering them within the cone of its anti-magic ray from its central eye.</p><p></p><p>Akari and Rale had been holding their own against the monstrosity - Rale from the safety of the doorway of the door he had picked to enter the beholder's room, ducking back into the doorway long enough to pepper the beholder with arrows before ducking back out of sight - and the addition of the other four heroes spelled doom for the levitating sphere of many eyes. Despite hitting a few of the heroes with various eye rays, it didn't manage to get them with the really important ones, which could disintegrate them at once or petrify them into a statue, before they had cut it down with spells and weapons of their own. Thunderwolf in particular was excited to have finally come up against such a monster of legend, while Rale reclaimed his fired arrows, placed them back into his quiver, and attacked the nearest of the locked doors with his thieves' tools.</p><p></p><p>Two of the locked doors were false doors, meant to simply waste time in the midst of battle with the beholder, but merely a source of irritation now that the beast had been slain. The third door's locking mechanism finally gave up under Rale's concentrated efforts, and the group found a short hallway just beyond, lined with glowing weapons, and a closed door at the far end. The weapons included a heavy mace, a longsword, a greatsword, a dagger, a short sword, a whip, a greataxe, and a light crossbow.</p><p></p><p>"Careful," advised Rale. "I wouldn't touch any of them."</p><p></p><p>"I would!" enthused Thunderwolf, grabbing up the nearest weapon, the short sword.</p><p></p><p>"Dibs on the greatsword!" called out Galrich at the same time, grabbing it up. Then, for good measure, he grabbed up the greataxe as well, offering it to Aerik. "Want it?" he asked.</p><p></p><p>"No thanks, My Lord," replied the dwarf, looking at it closely without actually touching it. "This smells too much like a trap."</p><p></p><p>"Nonsense," replied Galrich, as he and Thunderwolf grabbed up all of the weapons they could, ending up with four apiece and chuckling at the superstitiousness of their companions, up until the point that Thunderwolf tried putting them away in his pack. "Uh oh," he said with a worried tone in his voice.</p><p></p><p>"Problem?" asked Rale with just a hint of I-told-you-so in his voice.</p><p></p><p>"I, uh, can't seem to put this short sword down," the fighter admitted, trying to drop the weapon from his grip and failing.</p><p></p><p>"Let me see it," commanded Rale, and looked at the blade in Thunderwolf's hand. Again, avoiding touching the thing himself, he examined it closely, and asked, "You mean this jet-black blade with the symbol of Nerull, God of Death, carved into the hilt?"</p><p></p><p>"Why can't I drop it?" demanded Thunderwolf in a near panic.</p><p></p><p>"It's cursed, no doubt," replied Rale, the I-told-you-so in his voice now more than just a hint. "We can probably get Cal to try to break the curse when we get back, but for now you're stuck with it." He turned to Galrich. "Are any of the weapons you picked up preventing you from putting them down?" he asked.</p><p></p><p>"Nope," replied Galrich proudly. "Other than the mace telling me to kill all of you and bathe it in your blood, I haven't noticed anything at all unusual with any of my batch."</p><p></p><p>"Galrich!" chided Feron, hastily stepping away from him.</p><p></p><p>"It's okay," assured Galrich, "I put them all in my pack, and I'll let Cal sort through them before I actually use any of them, promise."</p><p></p><p>Not entirely reassured, Rale led the way to the far door, surprised to find it unlocked. Beyond was a large pool of dark water, flanked by a narrow walkway around it covered in tiles of glowing letters. There were words carved into the door at the far end of the room, but they couldn't make out what they said.</p><p></p><p>"I'll see what's up," Feron offered, climbing up onto the wall with her <em>boots of spider climbing</em> without touching any of the tiles on the floor. She climbed higher, and from her vantage point could see all of the letters around the pool. They were laid out as such:"Not another bloody word puzzle," groaned Galrich. "I hate this place!"</p><p></p><p>"This shouldn't be too difficult," reasoned Feron. "I imagine you need to step on the correct letters in sequence. The door is there between the 'D' and 'O,' so whatever you're supposed to spell out has to start with one of those letters." She looked to see if one "path" to the far door spelled out anything, with no luck.</p><p></p><p>"Go see what the door says," commanded Rale. "Maybe there's a clue there or something. And nobody step into the room until I say so!" he said sternly to Thunderwolf, who at least had the good grace to look sheepish. He tried for the umpteenth time to rid himself of the short sword, with no further luck.</p><p></p><p>"The door says, 'Is this correct, or do you wish to remain behind?'" Feron called back from the far side of the room. "But wait, above the door, there are some lines!" she called excitedly. "I'll bet they light up when you step on a letter!" She described them to Rale, who hurriedly jotted them down on a scrap of paper per Feron's instructions. He was left with the following:"So the first word should be two letters," reasoned Feron. "'DO.' Who's going to be our test subject?"</p><p></p><p>"I will," said Thunderwolf dejectedly. He knew he had screwed up by picking up the cursed short sword and wanted to make amends. At Feron's order, he stepped onto the tile with a "D," and upon doing so the glow went out of the letter on the tile at his feet, while at the same time a "D" appeared over the far door. "Now step onto the "'O'," commanded Feron, and Thunderwolf complied, with the same results. Although it involved a lot of walking back and forth between the two sides of the pool - which Feron eventually prevented by sending Thunderwolf down one side and Rale down the other, each stepping forward upon her command - eventually the phrase, "DO NOT SUMMON A FIENDISH KRAKEN TO APPEAR" was spelled out in glowing letters over the door.</p><p></p><p>"Yeah, good plan, let's not do that," agreed Rale, thinking back to the time he had been slain by a kraken and shuddering at the thought. "So what's with the phrase on the door?"</p><p></p><p>Feron examined it for a minute, before breaking out into a smile. "It's asking, 'left or right?'" she said triumphantly. "It's correct - we <em>don't</em> want to summon a fiendish kraken - so turn the handle to the right." Rale did so, and the door opened without incident. "I hate this place," he grumbled as they advanced to the next room.</p><p></p><p>There was a short corridor leading to a slightly larger room. Rale insisted on checking the corridor first before allowing anyone to proceed, and discovered a tripwire leading <em>into</em> the walls on either side. Testing a theory, he stuck his hand through one <em>illusory wall</em>, then popped his head in as well for a quick peek. "Mounted crossbow, waiting to shoot the first fool to trip on the wire here. There's probably another on on the other side." He had everybody step carefully over the wire, then did so himself and repositioned himself at the lead once again.</p><p></p><p>The room beyond was octagonal in shape, with a door off to the side and one longer side of the octagon opening into the corridor leading to the room. Rale didn't see any traps on the door, nor could he detect any magical runes waiting to activate any hidden spells, so he tried the door's knob and found it to be locked. That wasn't all, though: the entire door was a trap, which did several things in sequence once activated by touch. First, a 10-foot section of wall from the left side of the corridor behind them swung over and closed off the octagonal room and half the corridor, just beyond where the hidden crossbows still waited to shoot their bolts. Immediately after it closed and locked in place, a similar section from the right side of the corridor swung over and sealed the heroes into the octagonal section of the room. And then the eight walls of the octagonal room started slowly lowering into the floor.</p><p></p><p>A horrid stench of death wafted over the lowering walls; this and a low, moaning coming from dozens of disparate voices all around them led Feron to guess just what was waiting for them. And she was right yet again, for the lowering walls revealed an even larger octagonal room surrounding the smaller one the heroes were standing in, and filling just about every space between the two rooms were dozens of shambling zombies. The staggering undead reached out at the heroes over the separating wall that was waist high, then knee high, then sunken down to the level of the floor. The hungry zombies closed in on the heroes from all sides, Feron letting out a shriek of horror as they did so.</p><p></p><p>Akari reacted first, blasting a wide swath of the undead with the power of his raised holy symbol. Fortunately, while they were greatly outnumbered by the zombie horde, they moved no quicker than the zombies the group had encountered throughout their adventuring career, nor were they much tougher; Akari's positive energy blast disintegrated close to a dozen all at once. Galrich and Aerik flanked Feron, shielding her with their bodies as they hacked away at the zombies with greatsword and dwarven waraxe. Thunderwolf was forced to use the short sword of Nerull that refused to leave his hand, and found it was actively working against him, lessening the strength of his blows. Rale swore as he went into battle with his two short swords, hacking away and cursing the zombies' lack of critical points to strike for extra damage. Feron stayed in the center of the room and called down lightning strikes upon the zombies, trying her best not to touch, or be touched, by any of the foul undead. It took awhile, but eventually they destroyed the shambling corpses, leaving Akari and Rale to search the walls for a secret way out of the room, which they eventually discovered.</p><p></p><p>This led to a wide room with five vault doors, each holding a dual-alphabet set of dials like they had found (on a much larger scale) in the very first room they had encountered in the Lockpick Dungeons. There were letters carved in the spaces between the doors, spelling out the words "CHOOSE" and "WISELY" just below it, with the caption "FOR ONLY ONE DOOR BEFORE YOU OPENS TRUE" carved on the floor just in front of the doors. There was a large keyhole just below each set of dials on the door, which looked the right size to accommodate the key that had teleported them here.</p><p></p><p>"Another puzzle," groaned Rale, peeking through a keyhole at random and confirming that he couldn't see all the way through into the next room.</p><p></p><p>Feron went to the first door and started fiddling with the dials. Rale put the key into the keyhole, but it wouldn't unlock. He tried this with each of the five doors, with the same results.</p><p></p><p>"You probably have to line up the dials correctly," suggested Feron, spinning the dials so the "C" on the outer dial matched up with the "H" on the first door, since those were the top two letters flanking that door. "Try it now," she said.</p><p></p><p>Rale inserted the key into the keyhole, turned it, and the door opened up into a small room, the back wall of which was lined with serrated daggers, each with a glowing gem at the end of the pommel. "Nicely done!" said Rale, standing in the open doorway and looking at everything.</p><p></p><p>"What are you waiting for?" asked Galrich, trying to brush past the rogue and grab up the daggers.</p><p></p><p>"Not so fast!" snarled Rale. "Haven't you learned your lesson yet? Tell you what - give me a coin and you can pass."</p><p></p><p>"A coin? What for? I'm not paying you anything!"</p><p></p><p>"Just trust me," Rale responded. "You can have it right back." Galrich sneered, sure that there was some trick involved, but before he could reach for his coin purse Aerik had handed one over from his own - a copper piece, Rale noted with a smirk. Nonetheless, he took it from the dwarven bodyguard and flipped it into the room - where it promptly sunk through the floor and made a slightly squishy sound doing so.</p><p></p><p>"It's an illusion," replied Rale. He asked for his nine-and-a-half-foot pole, which Akari had stashed in his haversack for him, and poked it through the floor. Pulling it back out, he showed it to the others; it was covered in green slime.</p><p></p><p>"And that would have been you," Rale replied, the I-told-you-so in his voice having apparently decided to make itself comfortable and stay awhile. "I'll bet this whole room is an illusion." He poked at the glowing daggers with the slimy end of the nine-and-a-half-foot pole, upending a couple of them and dropping them into the green slime pit in the process. "Or maybe not," he amended.</p><p></p><p>Feron summoned an owl and had it grab up a dagger for them to inspect. It turned out to be a cheap copy made of tin, with a glass gem on the pommel, no doubt enhanced by a <em>Nystul's magic aura</em> spell. "Ruse," she announced. Still, she was pleased to have figured out how to open the doors, and was eager to open the others. She went to the second door, when Rale interrupted her.</p><p></p><p>"Let's try this one next," he suggested, walking over to the farthest door.</p><p></p><p>"Why that one?" Feron wanted to know.</p><p></p><p>"Because it's the last one most people would try, if they went in sequence," reasoned Rale. He didn't know it, but he was absolutely right, but for the wrong reason; applying the same trick Feron had discovered, by lining up the top letters on either side of each door and then translating the bottom two letters, the fifth door was the only one which gave the same letters when "translated." Regardless, the door opened after Feron had moved the dials into the correct configuration and Rale inserted the key. It led to a larger vault, also containing <em>assassin's life-drinking daggers</em> - only these seemed to be the real thing. Rale and Akari entered the vault to snatch them all up and stuff them into the paladin's haversack.</p><p></p><p>Then a familiar voice echoed across the room. "I'll take those," said Jhazmina, firing a crossbow at Thunderwolf, who was standing in the doorway to the vault. Feron dropped a lightning bolt on her from a <em>call lightning</em> spell as she stepped fully into the room from the same passageway they had used. Then the fourth vault door opened, and another elven woman entered the fray. She was attired the same way as Jhazmina, but also wielded an odd-looking rod that had a mummified hand at one end. Raising the rod, she vanished from view.</p><p></p><p>Jhazmina's form seemed to shimmer for just a moment, and then she raised her hand and caused a web to form across the fifth doorway, trapping Rale and Akari inside. However, it didn't long stand up against Hoardmaster, which cut through it almost effortlessly. In the meantime, Galrich and Aerik moved in to attack Jhazmina, while Thunderwolf was aggressively attacking the space in front of him with his cursed sword, trying to hit the invisible woman he knew had to be there somewhere. However, the newcomer, <strong>Aurielle</strong>, had leapt up to the ceiling immediately upon turning invisible and was crawling along its length to line up a sneak attack. She dropped from the ceiling behind Thunderwolf, shifting form and sinking her teeth into the flesh of his neck, injecting him with her venom.</p><p></p><p>Feron wasn't sure what to make of this, for the woman still seemed to be a female elf, albeit apparently now one with needlelike fangs. Still, the druidess decided to wildshape into one of the newer forms that her training had made available to her, and her body immediately burst into flame as she became a fire elemental. This shocked Aurielle, who leapt back up to the ceiling and started walking - on all fours - across its length, back through the fourth vault door, which led to a short stairwell leading down. Feron followed, and Aurielle realized that trying to attack a fire elemental with a poisonous bite attack was a poor tactic at best. She tried keeping her distance, while Feron swatted at her with a flaming fist.</p><p></p><p>Jhazmina wasn't faring too well against Galrich and Aerik, and did even worse when Rale and Akari approached with weapons drawn. She instinctively shifted, and the young aranea took on her spider form, skittering up a wall to the relative safety of the ceiling, where she was out of range of the heroes' melee weapons. Rale simply took the opportunity to use his shortbow, and sent several shafts burying themselves deep into her abdomen. Jhazmina leaped down at the nearest foe, hoping to pump Galrich full of venom before he had a chance to react, but he practically cut her in two with his greatsword before she had made it all the way down to the floor level. The aranea curled up and died on the spot.</p><p></p><p>Aurielle followed her aranea sister in death a scant few moments later, burned to death by Feron's fiery form. The stairs they had fought upon took a turn to the right and went even deeper into a living quarters for the two slain araneas. A calendar showed that several araneas took turns on guard duty at the Lockpick Dungeons, but whether they had built the place or were just running it was still not clear. There was little in the way of treasure, just a pair of <em>ioun stones</em> that prevented the users from needing to eat, which explained why there were no kitchens or bathroom facilities in the complex to be seen. The group grabbed them up, and Rale claimed the mummy-hand rod, which turned out to be particularly useful for a rogue, for it allowed the wielder to use a total of five spells each day, split up in any combination between <em>dispel magic</em>, <em>identify</em>, <em>invisibility</em>, <em>knock</em>, and <em>mage hand</em>. It could also wear a ring, allowing the wielder to gain the benefits of up to three rings (assuming he wore two rings himself).</p><p></p><p>And thus, another of Pinwhistle's prophecies had come true, for the warforged had told Rale: "The woman who will one day give you her hand will be dead before you place your ring upon it."</p><p></p><p>"Let's get out of here," suggested Rale.</p><p></p><p>"How?" asked Akari. "Thunderwolf doesn't have a Guild ring yet, so he can't bink back."</p><p></p><p>In the end, Feron binked back, allowing Delphyne to take her place in the Lockpick Dungeons. She had a <em>greater teleport</em> prepared, so she was able to bring the others with her back to Guild Headquarters. In the days that followed, they discovered that several of the souls imprisoned in the <em>assassin's life-drinker daggers</em> were prominent merchants from Greyhawk City, another was - like Galrich - inconveniently in line for a throne that someone else wanted for himself, and several others were just unlucky enough to be hated enough by people with enough money to stage their (semi-permanent, as it turned out) deaths. The heroes turned all of the daggers over to the Guild, and allowed them to sort out finding which souls were imprisoned in which gems, and who to contact about the fact.</p><p></p><p> - - -</p><p></p><p>I wrote this adventure for several reasons: I had long wanted to write a trap-based adventure to give Rale an opportunity to shine; I also wanted to throw some more puzzles at my players; but more importantly, I needed a way to get Galrich back in the game if the doppelganger assassin actually succeeded in slaying the half-orc and imprisoning his soul in the gem of an <em>assassin's life-drinking dagger </em>at the beginning of "Preemptive Regicide." I actually built a life-sized key, complete with the sliding bands of letters, for the players to monkey around with. Sadly, I used white poster board, so it's not the sturdiest of constructions, but it served its purpose.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Richards, post: 6114096, member: 508"] [B]ADVENTURE 64 - THE LOCKPICK DUNGEONS[/B] PC Roster:[INDENT]Akari, tiefling paladin of Hieroneous Feron Dru, half-elf druid Galrich Slayer, half-orc barbarian Rale Bodkin, human rogue Thunderwolf, human fighter[/INDENT] NPC Roster:[INDENT]Aerik Battershield, dwarven fighter[/INDENT] "Let me see that thing," commanded Feron. Rale, tired of playing with the foolish item and having gotten nowhere with it, handed it over without a fuss. Feron turned the oversized key around, studying the way the letters lined up on the wheels that circled the shaft. There were eight such wheels, each containing five letters in the Common alphabet. Obviously, it was some sort of elaborate word puzzle, and Feron usually excelled at those. Part of the problem, she decided, was that she couldn't see all of the letters at once. Getting out a sheet of parchment, she carefully inscribed each of the letters from each wheel. Looking over her work, she saw the following:"Look at the three blank spaces," Feron said. "Those must be word breaks. So we have a series of words, up to eight letters long, with some blanks filling in where more than one word shows up on the same line." "Try 'COMMAND WORD,'" suggested Akari. "These things always start out with 'COMMAND WORD.'" "Hmm," mused Feron. "There's no 'C' in either of the first two columns. It's not 'COMMAND WORD.'" Galrich peeked over Feron's shoulder as she puzzled over the letters. "Hey, that spells 'PIE,'" he pointed out, proud of his newly-learned ability to read and write. "And that there says, 'PORK.'" "It's [I]all[/I] got to say something," Feron said. She shuffled a couple of the wheels around, then looked back at her parchment. "I think the easiest way to figure this out is to concentrate on those blanks. Look at this one," she said, pointing to the blank in the fourth column. "That means the word in front of the blank can only have three letters. So what do we have? 'EVE?' 'DOE?' 'TOE?' 'DUO?' 'DUE?'" she mused aloud, scribbling the possibilities in the margins of her parchment. "How about 'TO?'" asked Rale. "Yeah, 'TOO' fits," affirmed Feron, adding it to her list of three-letter words. "No, with only one 'O,'" replied Rale, taking the key back from her and reconfiguring the wheels. "Blank, T, O, blank." The key now read:"Hey, that second line could be 'LOCKPICK,'" said Rale, flipping the wheels into position. For his trouble, he got:"That doesn't make any sense," Rale complained to himself. "There are two 'Ps' on that fifth wheel," pointed out Akari, flipping the other 'P' into place, and reading what was thus formed. 'TO THE LOCKPICK DUNGEONS TELEPORT EVERYONE.' Oh, wait, start here: 'TELEPORT EVERYONE TO THE LOCKPICK DUNGEONS.'" The command phrase haven been spoken aloud, the key did just that: it teleported everyone to the Lockpick Dungeons. The six heroes suddenly found themselves in a room filled with inky darkness. "Sonuva--" sputtered Rale. "Way to go, Akari! How about next time, we don't activate the command word until we're all ready to go?" "Uh, sorry about that," replied Akari sheepishly, as he opened up his haversack and started breaking out sun rods and passing them around. The group was in a large, rectangular room with six closed stone doors. Each of the doors had two lines of letters carved on them, as follows:In the center of the room were two concentric circular slabs of stone, each about a foot thick, pierced in their centers by a thick upright column of stone. All along the edges of the stone circles, evenly spaced, were the 26 letters of the Common alphabet, only the bottom circle had the alphabet running clockwise, and the smaller circle above it had the alphabet going counter-clockwise. Rale began by examining each of the stone doors. Since there were no knobs, handles, or hinges in sight, he surmised that these were the type of door that had a central column at top and bottom, which allowed the door to pivot when pushed on either side. He started with the first door, and pushed on both sides in turn, but it didn't budge. It did have a keyhole, though, and while the keyhole didn't go all the way through to the other side of the door to let him peek through, it did allow a means by which the door might be opened. Rale unpacked his lockpicks and went to work, noticing as he did so that there was an odd lilac perfume emanating from the door. Feron looked at the letter wheels in the middle of the chamber and at the letters engraved on the doors. While Rale worked at opening the first door, she wandered over to the second and tried pushing it open on the right side. That turned out to be a bad idea, as it blasted her with a beam of frigid energy as soon as she had touched it. She backed off, and scraped a layer of frost from her armor, face, and hands, shivering all the while. "Why don't you let me handle the doors?" asked Rale, looking up from his efforts at the first door. Feron just glared at the rogue and wandered back over to the twin circles. "I'll bet it's a combination lock of sorts," she said, looking at the letters on the third door. "'L, I, Z, M,'" she read, twisting the top stone circle so that the "A" inscribed on the bottom circle lined up with each of the four letters in turn. "That should do it," she announced, and then strode up purposefully to the third door. But then, after a moment's hesitation, she decided she didn't trust her solution enough to want to be the one to test out her theory; Akari gallantly stepped up in her place and gave the side of the stone door a shove. It didn't budge - but it did send a blast of fire that covered him from head to toe. With a cry of surprise, he backed away, glad to note that as a tiefling he was able to shrug off a small bit of the fire's effects. "I guess that's not the secret," winced Feron, and checked to see that Akari was okay. "Got it!" announced Rale, stepping back from the first door, putting his lockpicks away, and then pushing up against the right side. The door was heavy, but it swiveled on its central axis with a grinding sound. Unfortunately, it led only to a short stone corridor, at the end of which was another door. "I'll check it out," offered Galrich, but Rale held him back with a raised hand. "Let me examine it first," he recommended, and the half-orc stepped back, waiting impatiently as Rale gave the whole area a quick inspection. "I think it's trapped," he announced after about half a minute, during which he did nothing but swing his sun rod in various directions. "Let's try a different door." "What makes you say that?" demanded Galrich. "I don't see any traps." "Look closely at the floor," replied Rale. "You can see a crack going the whole length of the floor, all the way to the opposite door. I'd bet anything that the floor hinges open, and drops us into a pit below or something." "It smells nice, though," pointed out Feron, who had wandered open to see what Rale had found. "Lilacs." "Yeah, no idea about that," admitted Rale. "Which door should we try next?" "There's got to be a reason for those letters on the doors," said Feron. She turned to Rale and asked, "Is there such a thing as a combination lock for a door like these?" "Sure, it's possible," said Rale. "Pick a door, and we'll give it a try." Feron opted for the sixth door, and painstaking lined up the stone dials so the "A" on the bottom wheel lined up with the "P," "W," "K," and "Y" in turn. "That should do it..." she said, with a glimmer of doubt in her voice. Galrich, bored by now, offered to push it open, but it wouldn't budge. However, it didn't zap him either, which Feron chose to take as a good sign. Rale applied himself to the task of picking the lock through the keyhole, while the others stood around him holding up their sun rods to give him proper illumination by which to work his magic. Feron was back to examining the stone circles, sure she was missing something. Rale successfully opened the lock on the sixth door, and stood back as Galrich pushed it open. Just like the first door, this one led to a short corridor with another door at the far end; this time, Galrich anticipated Rale's warning and stepped back after having opened the door, so that Rale could check it out first. Aerik nodded in appreciation of his liege's uncommon sensibility, for once. Rale checked the floor, the intersections between the floor and walls and between the walls and ceiling, and professed them to be safe enough to enter. He stepped into the short corridor, checking his surroundings before advancing, and finally approached the far door. "Another trap," he announced. "There's a rune hidden here at the top of the door; looks like it's triggered to go off as soon as anybody touches this door." "Then I vote we don't touch this door," piped up Akari. The others agreed - and then spun frantically in place at the sound of Feron's shriek, then raced back into the central chamber to find out what fate had befallen the druid. But Feron was fine - in fact, she was grinning from ear to ear. "We've been concentrating on the wrong letters!" she announced happily. "Look at the top rows on all of the doors: they only have two letters, 'I' and 'V.' Watch what happens when I line the 'I' on top with the 'I' on the bottom: the 'V' on top lines up with the 'V' on the bottom!" "So?" Rale demanded. "So read me those letters on that door you just opened," she commanded. As Rale did so, she called out the corresponding letters on the other letter wheel now that they were lined up properly. "'B-U-G-S' - bugs! I'll bet the trap summons a swarm of bugs of some type!" Using the same technique, Feron discovered that the first door was marked with "ACID" in code, which no doubt explained the scent of lilacs: a permanent olfactory illusion to cover the stringent scent of the pool of acid waiting just below the floor trap. Doors two and three were coded for "COLD" and "FIRE" respectively, which made sense, as Feron and Akari had discovered on their own. The fourth door was marked "HARM" and the fifth "SAFE," so Door Five it was. It was locked, but it didn't hold up to Rale's lockpicking abilities any better than Doors One and Six had, and before too long the group was through the door and heading down a flight of stairs that bent to the right and opened into another large chamber. This one had two passageways flanked by pillars, with a carved message of some type between the doors. Rale led the way, checking for traps, and read the engraved message.Looking down the corridors without actually entering them, Rale saw each was another short passageway with a door at the end. He had already learned that that particular configuration was not necessarily to be trusted, here in the Lockpick Dungeons, and gave a close scrutiny to each. After he had determined that the floor of the corridor on the left didn't look to be attached to the walls of that corridor, Akari called out from behind him that he'd found a secret door. It was on the wall to the side of the stairs by which the group had entered. Not trusting the obvious exits from the room, Rale decided to give the secret passageway a try. He led the way, checking for traps every couple of feet, to the obvious exasperation of Galrich, who just wanted to [I]get on with it![/I] The secret passage curved around and opened into another room, judging from the door placement the room on the other side of the two short corridors. However, there was a door to the north which corresponded with the door of the leftmost corridor, whereas the short corridor to the right apparently ended up at a false door, for there was no corresponding door in this room. There was another door to the south, this one much larger than the others. Akari and Rale stepped up to examine it. It, too, had letters engraved upon it. They read:"Great, another word puzzle," complained Rale. "Whoever built this place was obviously a puzzle junkie." The group crowded around the letters, and Akari was the first to point out that the letters for the words "COMMAND WORD" - well, all except for the final "D" - could be found in the top two rows. After a moment's scrutiny, he saw that the two-word phrase could be figured out by bumping up and down along the top two rows, then bouncing back the way he'd come, dropping down to the next two rows, and completing the process. "'COMMAND WORD TO OPEN THE DOOR IS MORD," he read aloud. Immediately upon saying the word "Mord," the large door raised up into the wall, revealing a small room inside. Rale gave it a quick perusal while standing outside the now-open door, and announced that he didn't see anything overtly traplike. He and Akari stepped into the small room to give it a more thorough inspection. After about a half-minute, the door suddenly swung closed again, trapping the two inside. Before they had an opportunity to do anything, the entire room plummeted down a corkscrewed shaft, spinning counterclockwise as it did so. At the end of the twisted shaft, the door opened, the whole room tipped forward, and the two adventurers were pitched unceremoniously into the room just beyond. As they spilled into a heap, they could hear the door closing behind them and the elevator room rising back up to the upper level. On that upper level, Feron and the others were trying to find a way to open the now-shut door, as the command word was no longer working. As they pounded fruitlessly on the door, there was a sudden grinding noise behind them, and they turned to see a young elven woman in leather armor, wearing a short sword belted at her hip, emerging from another secret passageway across the room from them. "Oh!" she exclaimed in surprise. "Hello! My name is [B]Jhazmina[/B]. I assume you guys got here the same way I did?" And with that, she held up an identical copy of the magical key that Akari had been holding when the whole group got teleported to the Lockpick Dungeons. Feron immediately distrusted this sudden newcomer; perhaps she'd been hanging around Rale too long? "Keep your distance," she warned, her hand on the hilt of her scimitar. "Just where did you come from?" she demanded. "A small town called Riverton," Jhazmina replied. "I found this key in a chest filled with--oh, you mean right now!" She nodded to the secret passage in the stone wall behind her. "There's a secret door back here. It leads to a small pile of armor and weapons, none of the type that I can use, but there's a suit of armor that might fit the dwarf. C'mon, I'll show you!" And with that, she turned back to the crack in the wall and opened it further, revealing another pivoting door. "Hold," commanded Galrich to his dwarven bodyguard, oblivious to the fact that Aerik hadn't budged an inch from where he was standing. In fact, Aerik had his dwarven greataxe at the ready, in case this elven lass had treachery in her heart. "Goodness, you're a twitchy bunch," Jhazmina observed, after noticing that nobody was moving to follow her to the treasure she had unearthed. "Okay, suit yourselves. I couldn't tell if any of the stuff was magical, but it did look to be in pretty good condition." Thunderwolf, a bit embarrassed about how the group was treating this pretty young elf, stepped up and introduced himself, but was then pulled back by Feron. "Keep your distance," commanded Feron. "We don't know anything about her." Meanwhile, down below, Rale and Akari picked themselves up from the floor and looked around at their new surroundings. They were in a smallish room, with a floor covered in alternating squares of white and black, like a chessboard. There was a mist rising up from the floor, quickly covering the lower half of the room, making it difficult to see - but before the [I]obscuring mist[/I] effect fully took hold, they saw a closed door across the room and a disturbingly familiar shadowy object floating around the far corner of the room. It bobbed and turned to face them, eyestalks twisting to point in their direction as it did so. "Down!" shouted Rale as he dove to the ground, hiding in the mist. Akari, in his full plate armor, wasn't as quick to make it prone, but managed to do so just as a beam of energy flashed over his head. "Beholder!" he yelled, as Rale crouched behind the armor-clad paladin for protection. "Let's split up," suggested Rale in a whisper. "We'll take him from both sides." "Bad idea," argued Akari, just as quietly. "If we stick together, it should only have three eyestalks capable of aiming at us at any one time. If we split up, we each get three pointed at us." As if to help make his point, another beam blasted directly over their heads. "Okay, fine," hissed Rale. "You go first, I'll be right behind you." Akari looked back at his companion, unsure if the rogue actually meant it or was simply trying to get the paladin to go do all of the fighting. Either way, he turned back in the direction of the beholder and started creeping up to it, as quietly as he could. Then, when it was once again in his sight, he sprang up and swung [I]Hoardmaster[/I] into it with all of his might. Surprisingly, his single swing cut the floating beast in twain, and it exploded into his face in an eruption of spores. Too late, Akari realized he had not been in valiant combat with a beholder, but rather with a gas spore - and the [I]obscuring mist[/I] and illusions of flashing beams of energy had only reinforced the charade. Fortunately, Akari's tiefling constitution was able to shrug off the effects of the spores, and after a brief fit of coughing he was ready to move on. Rale moved on with him now that the danger was over, and together they found their way over to door across the way. It was locked, and Rale started in on it with his lockpicks. "Shouldn't we go back for the others?" asked Akari. "They saw what happened to us," responded Rale. "I imagine they should be right behind us." By then, the elevator room had risen back up to the upper level and Feron discovered that repeating the command word "Mord" was working once again - apparently it was a fail-safe, to prevent one from opening the door to an empty shaft. "Door's open, guys!" she said, looking over her shoulder at the empty room behind her, and the wide-open secret door that Jhazmina had used. "Idiots!" she hissed between her teeth as she poked her head through the secret door, which turned a corner and led to a short set of stairs. Sure enough, Jhazmina was down at the bottom, about to turn the corner to the right, with Thunderwolf behind her and Galrich and Aerik behind him. At least Aerik had the good sense to be shaking his head, as if he was sure this wasn't a good idea. He was right. Jhazmina popped back around the corner and aimed a wand at the group conveniently bunched up in a straight line along the narrow steps. Feron was quick enough to anticipate what was coming and dodged back around the corner up at the top of the stairs, and thus avoided the [I]lightning bolt[/I] Jhazmina sent flying up the stairwell. Cries of pain from her comrades illicited nothing more than a quick thought of [I]It serves you idiots right![/I] from an angered Feron. Thunderwolf, the first in line on the stairs, swung Xanthros at the nimble elf, but she dodged below his swing and crossed over to the left side of the cross-corridor at the bottom of the stairs, kicking open a barricade from a hidden door and swinging down through it in a single move. Thunderwolf and the others raced after her, pulling the door open and poking their heads in - and then pulled them right back out again and slammed the door back shut. "What's back there?" called down Feron from the top of the stairs. "Gelatinous cube," replied Galrich. "Did it get her?" "No such luck," replied the half-orc. "She scampered up the wall on the other side. She must have been wearing boots like you've got." Here he was referring to Feron's [I]boots of spider climbing[/I], which had been put to good use on many an adventure. Feron tried visualizing the layout of the Lockpick Dungeons as she understood them, and realized that the gelatinous cube would almost certainly have been directly underneath the leftmost corridor from the room which offered two different hallways to traverse - both of them apparently trapped. "So have you had enough fun down there, ignoring my suggestions not to trust strangers you meet in a dungeon?" "Yes, Feron," replied Thunderwolf sheepishly, and began trudging back up the stairs. Aerik took a moment to check out the small pile of treasure that Jhazmina had referred to to lure them all down there, and sure enough, there [I]was[/I] a small pile of weapons and armor down there, even including a suit of dwarven half-plate and a dwarven battleaxe. Aerik passed on the armor, preferring his own, but he picked up the battleaxe as a backup weapon, and some further poking around discovered a magical dagger and a few potions, which were distributed among the group. Eventually, though, Feron managed to herd the group into the elevator room, which had been waiting patiently for them. They stood inside the room waiting for something to happen, and after about 30 seconds the room plunged down the corkscrewing shaft as it had before, dumping them into a heap into a room filled with mist as it had earlier done to Akari and Rale. However, they could hear sounds of battle coming from the far side of the room, so they got to their feet and headed in that direction. In the other room, Rale had managed to open the lock and enter the room and he found it remarkably like the room he and Akari had just left: same size, same black and while tiles on the floor, same beholder levitating in the far corner of the room. In fact, the only differences seemed to be that there were two additional doors leading out of this room, the tiles didn't seem to activate any illusion spells, and the beholder was very much a beholder, angered at the intrusion. It blasted the two with eye rays when it wasn't covering them within the cone of its anti-magic ray from its central eye. Akari and Rale had been holding their own against the monstrosity - Rale from the safety of the doorway of the door he had picked to enter the beholder's room, ducking back into the doorway long enough to pepper the beholder with arrows before ducking back out of sight - and the addition of the other four heroes spelled doom for the levitating sphere of many eyes. Despite hitting a few of the heroes with various eye rays, it didn't manage to get them with the really important ones, which could disintegrate them at once or petrify them into a statue, before they had cut it down with spells and weapons of their own. Thunderwolf in particular was excited to have finally come up against such a monster of legend, while Rale reclaimed his fired arrows, placed them back into his quiver, and attacked the nearest of the locked doors with his thieves' tools. Two of the locked doors were false doors, meant to simply waste time in the midst of battle with the beholder, but merely a source of irritation now that the beast had been slain. The third door's locking mechanism finally gave up under Rale's concentrated efforts, and the group found a short hallway just beyond, lined with glowing weapons, and a closed door at the far end. The weapons included a heavy mace, a longsword, a greatsword, a dagger, a short sword, a whip, a greataxe, and a light crossbow. "Careful," advised Rale. "I wouldn't touch any of them." "I would!" enthused Thunderwolf, grabbing up the nearest weapon, the short sword. "Dibs on the greatsword!" called out Galrich at the same time, grabbing it up. Then, for good measure, he grabbed up the greataxe as well, offering it to Aerik. "Want it?" he asked. "No thanks, My Lord," replied the dwarf, looking at it closely without actually touching it. "This smells too much like a trap." "Nonsense," replied Galrich, as he and Thunderwolf grabbed up all of the weapons they could, ending up with four apiece and chuckling at the superstitiousness of their companions, up until the point that Thunderwolf tried putting them away in his pack. "Uh oh," he said with a worried tone in his voice. "Problem?" asked Rale with just a hint of I-told-you-so in his voice. "I, uh, can't seem to put this short sword down," the fighter admitted, trying to drop the weapon from his grip and failing. "Let me see it," commanded Rale, and looked at the blade in Thunderwolf's hand. Again, avoiding touching the thing himself, he examined it closely, and asked, "You mean this jet-black blade with the symbol of Nerull, God of Death, carved into the hilt?" "Why can't I drop it?" demanded Thunderwolf in a near panic. "It's cursed, no doubt," replied Rale, the I-told-you-so in his voice now more than just a hint. "We can probably get Cal to try to break the curse when we get back, but for now you're stuck with it." He turned to Galrich. "Are any of the weapons you picked up preventing you from putting them down?" he asked. "Nope," replied Galrich proudly. "Other than the mace telling me to kill all of you and bathe it in your blood, I haven't noticed anything at all unusual with any of my batch." "Galrich!" chided Feron, hastily stepping away from him. "It's okay," assured Galrich, "I put them all in my pack, and I'll let Cal sort through them before I actually use any of them, promise." Not entirely reassured, Rale led the way to the far door, surprised to find it unlocked. Beyond was a large pool of dark water, flanked by a narrow walkway around it covered in tiles of glowing letters. There were words carved into the door at the far end of the room, but they couldn't make out what they said. "I'll see what's up," Feron offered, climbing up onto the wall with her [I]boots of spider climbing[/I] without touching any of the tiles on the floor. She climbed higher, and from her vantage point could see all of the letters around the pool. They were laid out as such:"Not another bloody word puzzle," groaned Galrich. "I hate this place!" "This shouldn't be too difficult," reasoned Feron. "I imagine you need to step on the correct letters in sequence. The door is there between the 'D' and 'O,' so whatever you're supposed to spell out has to start with one of those letters." She looked to see if one "path" to the far door spelled out anything, with no luck. "Go see what the door says," commanded Rale. "Maybe there's a clue there or something. And nobody step into the room until I say so!" he said sternly to Thunderwolf, who at least had the good grace to look sheepish. He tried for the umpteenth time to rid himself of the short sword, with no further luck. "The door says, 'Is this correct, or do you wish to remain behind?'" Feron called back from the far side of the room. "But wait, above the door, there are some lines!" she called excitedly. "I'll bet they light up when you step on a letter!" She described them to Rale, who hurriedly jotted them down on a scrap of paper per Feron's instructions. He was left with the following:"So the first word should be two letters," reasoned Feron. "'DO.' Who's going to be our test subject?" "I will," said Thunderwolf dejectedly. He knew he had screwed up by picking up the cursed short sword and wanted to make amends. At Feron's order, he stepped onto the tile with a "D," and upon doing so the glow went out of the letter on the tile at his feet, while at the same time a "D" appeared over the far door. "Now step onto the "'O'," commanded Feron, and Thunderwolf complied, with the same results. Although it involved a lot of walking back and forth between the two sides of the pool - which Feron eventually prevented by sending Thunderwolf down one side and Rale down the other, each stepping forward upon her command - eventually the phrase, "DO NOT SUMMON A FIENDISH KRAKEN TO APPEAR" was spelled out in glowing letters over the door. "Yeah, good plan, let's not do that," agreed Rale, thinking back to the time he had been slain by a kraken and shuddering at the thought. "So what's with the phrase on the door?" Feron examined it for a minute, before breaking out into a smile. "It's asking, 'left or right?'" she said triumphantly. "It's correct - we [I]don't[/I] want to summon a fiendish kraken - so turn the handle to the right." Rale did so, and the door opened without incident. "I hate this place," he grumbled as they advanced to the next room. There was a short corridor leading to a slightly larger room. Rale insisted on checking the corridor first before allowing anyone to proceed, and discovered a tripwire leading [I]into[/I] the walls on either side. Testing a theory, he stuck his hand through one [I]illusory wall[/I], then popped his head in as well for a quick peek. "Mounted crossbow, waiting to shoot the first fool to trip on the wire here. There's probably another on on the other side." He had everybody step carefully over the wire, then did so himself and repositioned himself at the lead once again. The room beyond was octagonal in shape, with a door off to the side and one longer side of the octagon opening into the corridor leading to the room. Rale didn't see any traps on the door, nor could he detect any magical runes waiting to activate any hidden spells, so he tried the door's knob and found it to be locked. That wasn't all, though: the entire door was a trap, which did several things in sequence once activated by touch. First, a 10-foot section of wall from the left side of the corridor behind them swung over and closed off the octagonal room and half the corridor, just beyond where the hidden crossbows still waited to shoot their bolts. Immediately after it closed and locked in place, a similar section from the right side of the corridor swung over and sealed the heroes into the octagonal section of the room. And then the eight walls of the octagonal room started slowly lowering into the floor. A horrid stench of death wafted over the lowering walls; this and a low, moaning coming from dozens of disparate voices all around them led Feron to guess just what was waiting for them. And she was right yet again, for the lowering walls revealed an even larger octagonal room surrounding the smaller one the heroes were standing in, and filling just about every space between the two rooms were dozens of shambling zombies. The staggering undead reached out at the heroes over the separating wall that was waist high, then knee high, then sunken down to the level of the floor. The hungry zombies closed in on the heroes from all sides, Feron letting out a shriek of horror as they did so. Akari reacted first, blasting a wide swath of the undead with the power of his raised holy symbol. Fortunately, while they were greatly outnumbered by the zombie horde, they moved no quicker than the zombies the group had encountered throughout their adventuring career, nor were they much tougher; Akari's positive energy blast disintegrated close to a dozen all at once. Galrich and Aerik flanked Feron, shielding her with their bodies as they hacked away at the zombies with greatsword and dwarven waraxe. Thunderwolf was forced to use the short sword of Nerull that refused to leave his hand, and found it was actively working against him, lessening the strength of his blows. Rale swore as he went into battle with his two short swords, hacking away and cursing the zombies' lack of critical points to strike for extra damage. Feron stayed in the center of the room and called down lightning strikes upon the zombies, trying her best not to touch, or be touched, by any of the foul undead. It took awhile, but eventually they destroyed the shambling corpses, leaving Akari and Rale to search the walls for a secret way out of the room, which they eventually discovered. This led to a wide room with five vault doors, each holding a dual-alphabet set of dials like they had found (on a much larger scale) in the very first room they had encountered in the Lockpick Dungeons. There were letters carved in the spaces between the doors, spelling out the words "CHOOSE" and "WISELY" just below it, with the caption "FOR ONLY ONE DOOR BEFORE YOU OPENS TRUE" carved on the floor just in front of the doors. There was a large keyhole just below each set of dials on the door, which looked the right size to accommodate the key that had teleported them here. "Another puzzle," groaned Rale, peeking through a keyhole at random and confirming that he couldn't see all the way through into the next room. Feron went to the first door and started fiddling with the dials. Rale put the key into the keyhole, but it wouldn't unlock. He tried this with each of the five doors, with the same results. "You probably have to line up the dials correctly," suggested Feron, spinning the dials so the "C" on the outer dial matched up with the "H" on the first door, since those were the top two letters flanking that door. "Try it now," she said. Rale inserted the key into the keyhole, turned it, and the door opened up into a small room, the back wall of which was lined with serrated daggers, each with a glowing gem at the end of the pommel. "Nicely done!" said Rale, standing in the open doorway and looking at everything. "What are you waiting for?" asked Galrich, trying to brush past the rogue and grab up the daggers. "Not so fast!" snarled Rale. "Haven't you learned your lesson yet? Tell you what - give me a coin and you can pass." "A coin? What for? I'm not paying you anything!" "Just trust me," Rale responded. "You can have it right back." Galrich sneered, sure that there was some trick involved, but before he could reach for his coin purse Aerik had handed one over from his own - a copper piece, Rale noted with a smirk. Nonetheless, he took it from the dwarven bodyguard and flipped it into the room - where it promptly sunk through the floor and made a slightly squishy sound doing so. "It's an illusion," replied Rale. He asked for his nine-and-a-half-foot pole, which Akari had stashed in his haversack for him, and poked it through the floor. Pulling it back out, he showed it to the others; it was covered in green slime. "And that would have been you," Rale replied, the I-told-you-so in his voice having apparently decided to make itself comfortable and stay awhile. "I'll bet this whole room is an illusion." He poked at the glowing daggers with the slimy end of the nine-and-a-half-foot pole, upending a couple of them and dropping them into the green slime pit in the process. "Or maybe not," he amended. Feron summoned an owl and had it grab up a dagger for them to inspect. It turned out to be a cheap copy made of tin, with a glass gem on the pommel, no doubt enhanced by a [I]Nystul's magic aura[/I] spell. "Ruse," she announced. Still, she was pleased to have figured out how to open the doors, and was eager to open the others. She went to the second door, when Rale interrupted her. "Let's try this one next," he suggested, walking over to the farthest door. "Why that one?" Feron wanted to know. "Because it's the last one most people would try, if they went in sequence," reasoned Rale. He didn't know it, but he was absolutely right, but for the wrong reason; applying the same trick Feron had discovered, by lining up the top letters on either side of each door and then translating the bottom two letters, the fifth door was the only one which gave the same letters when "translated." Regardless, the door opened after Feron had moved the dials into the correct configuration and Rale inserted the key. It led to a larger vault, also containing [I]assassin's life-drinking daggers[/I] - only these seemed to be the real thing. Rale and Akari entered the vault to snatch them all up and stuff them into the paladin's haversack. Then a familiar voice echoed across the room. "I'll take those," said Jhazmina, firing a crossbow at Thunderwolf, who was standing in the doorway to the vault. Feron dropped a lightning bolt on her from a [I]call lightning[/I] spell as she stepped fully into the room from the same passageway they had used. Then the fourth vault door opened, and another elven woman entered the fray. She was attired the same way as Jhazmina, but also wielded an odd-looking rod that had a mummified hand at one end. Raising the rod, she vanished from view. Jhazmina's form seemed to shimmer for just a moment, and then she raised her hand and caused a web to form across the fifth doorway, trapping Rale and Akari inside. However, it didn't long stand up against Hoardmaster, which cut through it almost effortlessly. In the meantime, Galrich and Aerik moved in to attack Jhazmina, while Thunderwolf was aggressively attacking the space in front of him with his cursed sword, trying to hit the invisible woman he knew had to be there somewhere. However, the newcomer, [B]Aurielle[/B], had leapt up to the ceiling immediately upon turning invisible and was crawling along its length to line up a sneak attack. She dropped from the ceiling behind Thunderwolf, shifting form and sinking her teeth into the flesh of his neck, injecting him with her venom. Feron wasn't sure what to make of this, for the woman still seemed to be a female elf, albeit apparently now one with needlelike fangs. Still, the druidess decided to wildshape into one of the newer forms that her training had made available to her, and her body immediately burst into flame as she became a fire elemental. This shocked Aurielle, who leapt back up to the ceiling and started walking - on all fours - across its length, back through the fourth vault door, which led to a short stairwell leading down. Feron followed, and Aurielle realized that trying to attack a fire elemental with a poisonous bite attack was a poor tactic at best. She tried keeping her distance, while Feron swatted at her with a flaming fist. Jhazmina wasn't faring too well against Galrich and Aerik, and did even worse when Rale and Akari approached with weapons drawn. She instinctively shifted, and the young aranea took on her spider form, skittering up a wall to the relative safety of the ceiling, where she was out of range of the heroes' melee weapons. Rale simply took the opportunity to use his shortbow, and sent several shafts burying themselves deep into her abdomen. Jhazmina leaped down at the nearest foe, hoping to pump Galrich full of venom before he had a chance to react, but he practically cut her in two with his greatsword before she had made it all the way down to the floor level. The aranea curled up and died on the spot. Aurielle followed her aranea sister in death a scant few moments later, burned to death by Feron's fiery form. The stairs they had fought upon took a turn to the right and went even deeper into a living quarters for the two slain araneas. A calendar showed that several araneas took turns on guard duty at the Lockpick Dungeons, but whether they had built the place or were just running it was still not clear. There was little in the way of treasure, just a pair of [I]ioun stones[/I] that prevented the users from needing to eat, which explained why there were no kitchens or bathroom facilities in the complex to be seen. The group grabbed them up, and Rale claimed the mummy-hand rod, which turned out to be particularly useful for a rogue, for it allowed the wielder to use a total of five spells each day, split up in any combination between [I]dispel magic[/I], [I]identify[/I], [I]invisibility[/I], [I]knock[/I], and [I]mage hand[/I]. It could also wear a ring, allowing the wielder to gain the benefits of up to three rings (assuming he wore two rings himself). And thus, another of Pinwhistle's prophecies had come true, for the warforged had told Rale: "The woman who will one day give you her hand will be dead before you place your ring upon it." "Let's get out of here," suggested Rale. "How?" asked Akari. "Thunderwolf doesn't have a Guild ring yet, so he can't bink back." In the end, Feron binked back, allowing Delphyne to take her place in the Lockpick Dungeons. She had a [I]greater teleport[/I] prepared, so she was able to bring the others with her back to Guild Headquarters. In the days that followed, they discovered that several of the souls imprisoned in the [I]assassin's life-drinker daggers[/I] were prominent merchants from Greyhawk City, another was - like Galrich - inconveniently in line for a throne that someone else wanted for himself, and several others were just unlucky enough to be hated enough by people with enough money to stage their (semi-permanent, as it turned out) deaths. The heroes turned all of the daggers over to the Guild, and allowed them to sort out finding which souls were imprisoned in which gems, and who to contact about the fact. - - - I wrote this adventure for several reasons: I had long wanted to write a trap-based adventure to give Rale an opportunity to shine; I also wanted to throw some more puzzles at my players; but more importantly, I needed a way to get Galrich back in the game if the doppelganger assassin actually succeeded in slaying the half-orc and imprisoning his soul in the gem of an [I]assassin's life-drinking dagger [/I]at the beginning of "Preemptive Regicide." I actually built a life-sized key, complete with the sliding bands of letters, for the players to monkey around with. Sadly, I used white poster board, so it's not the sturdiest of constructions, but it served its purpose. [/QUOTE]
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