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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CleverName" data-source="post: 1238448" data-attributes="member: 2591">Adventure 13Gnomeward BoundContinuing the journal of Gudlaug Hamarson (Jon Hanna)We made a brief stay with the Stone giants, during which time we cured the rest of their tribe of the disease that had infected them.  Copoc and I also healed the wounds the party had taken in our battle with Haken’s group of treacherous adventurers.  A day or so later we made our way to the crack in the mountain that the Stone giant chief had told us about, accompanied by a few giant guards.  We were to give any and all of the magic masking crystal that we might come across to these giants.  Of course, we were most interested in obtaining the Wyrd that was supposedly hidden inside.  Malcolm and I agreed that if we could get our hands on the Wyrd, it would be an invaluable item with which to bargain with the Cimbri queen of Vacomagus.Malcolm, Copoc and I entered the entryway early in the morning.  After traveling eastward down a corridor for about 60 feet, we came to a chamber with a marble statue of a Gnome standing on a tall pedestal.  The pedestal radiated magic, so we decided to give it a wide berth.  The statue was obviously of the gnome sorcerer, Harseth, that Haken had told us was buried here.  He was the owner of the Wyrd that Haken was so intent upon obtaining.   Harseth had died about a hundred years ago, and this was crypt.  Why a gnome sorcerer wanted to be buried on Jormunsteinn is a mystery.  Well, maybe it’s not all that mysterious.  The magic shielding effects of the crystal that is said to be found here was probably the reason.  Harseth probably figured that it would keep adventurous types from finding his tomb and raiding it.  I guess that plan went to Hel didn’t it?Copoc and I stayed back while Malcolm searched the area for traps.  There were hallways leading in opposite directions from the room with the pedestal.  Malcolm started carefully checking the passage, which led to the north.  Well, he indeed did discover a trap, as a huge barrel-shaped stone came flying down the hall at tremendous speed.  Malcolm dodged, so the stone kept on coming towards Copoc and I.  We were bowled over, and the stone struck the magical pedestal in the room behind us.  The stone was disintegrated as it struck the pedestal.  Now we knew what the magic effect had been!  Malcolm told us that another magic effect had been triggered when the stone had brushed against him as it rolled down the hall.  Apparently it had an effect that would turn a victim into stone.  Then the barrel would then shatter him into dust.  Nasty stuff.   We heard a noise coming from the direction where the barrel had come from.  It sounded like another stone barrel was being automatically reloaded into the trap.  Malcolm quickly managed to wedge the trigger for the trap safely while we passed.  We turned into an east leading passage.  I stayed back while Malcolm and Copoc went forward.  They entered a room that was apparently the crypt.  There was a stone coffin that had been opened and searched through, apparently years before.  It looked like someone had beaten us to the crypt and had already despoiled it.  While I guarded in the hall, the others looked around for any secret doors, but found none.  We decided to go back the way we had come and go down the southward passage from the room with the statue of Harseth.As we started down that passage, we heard a heavy scraping sound echoing towards us.  Much to our surprise and discomfort, a stone golem was coming our way.  Harseth, apparently being a vain little gnome, had fashioned the 10-foot tall golem in his own likeness.  There’s nothing quite like being attacked by a giant stone yard gnome.  This fight was brutally tough.  Not knowing what else to do, I cast Stone to Mud on the golem.  This apparently slowed him up a bit.  Copoc readied his war club, while Malcolm jumped up to trade blows with the creature.  This was a mistake.  The golem was incredibly tough.  I’ll have to study up on them in case I ever run into one again.  It sucked up a lot of damage and seemingly shrugged it off, while it was dealing horrific damage to Malcolm.  Copoc and I tried to help, but we quickly found that our efforts were pretty useless.  The golem dealt a crippling blow to Malcolm, which knocked him unconscious.  In desperation I called forth a dire bear in the hallway behind the golem, and had it attack.  Copoc healed Malcolm back to consciousness. Unfortunately when Malcolm tried to stand, the golem dealt him such a tremendous blow, that Copoc and I were splattered with his teeth, blood, and brains.  His lifeless corpse lay in a pile at our feet.“By the great spirit,” Copoc blurted, “He snuffed Malcolm!”“Let’s get the F*** out of here!” I bravely respondedWhile the bear and the golem were grappling, we drug Malcolm’s body out of the crypt, out to the ledge on the mountainside.  Copoc and I left it there and went back in.  Malcolm had done a lot of damage to the golem, and the bear was continuing the onslaught.  I summoned up 2 dire wolfs to help, and eventually the golem was destroyed.  It had beaten the dire bear bloody, but it was finally gone.  Copoc and I went back out to deal with Malcolm’s body...Luckily, I had a scroll of reincarnation.  I set about casting the spell.  When I asked Malcolm’s spirit if he wanted to come back, he hemmed and hawed a little, but eventually agreed.  You never know what you’ll return as when you get reincarnated, so Copoc and I were interested in seeing just what Malcolm would be  -- wouldn't a gnome be ironic? As his body was reforming, it looked for a second like it had an Alfar shape, but it changed into a true Cimbri form as it finalized.  Malcolm looked like a fairly nondescript, non-tattooed Cimbri.  He was somewhat disgruntled at having been killed, but all in all, it could have been a lot worse.  We decided to sleep the night and return to the crypt the next day.The following morning, we went back in and continued down the hall where the golem had killed Malcolm.  He didn’t look happy when he saw the smeared blood on the floor.  We kept going down the hall and entered a library.  There were many books and scrolls kept behind glass on shelves there.  There was also another statue of that frigging gnome Harseth.  We eventually discovered that there was poison behind the glass that would flow out if the glass were broken.  We all thought that there had to be something we were missing, because as far as we knew we had searched the entire crypt by this point.  We started looking for secret doors, but couldn’t find anything.  I said we should go back and check the crypt room one more time, because it seemed suspicious.  We went back in, and this time I came in with the others.  Well, I discovered that the room was actually under an illusion.  My being a druidical dwarf with enough smarts to not be fooled by such things allowed me to see through it instantly.  I saw that the room was actually larger than the others had found it yesterday, and there were passageway leading from it to the east and south.  The stone coffin that looked like it had been despoiled was obviously a ruse to discourage people like us.  We went down the eastward passage, and after dealing with another illusion that made the door at the end appear inoperable, we finally made it into the real crypt room.  After some searching, we found Harseth’s robes, which appear to be very powerful, as well as some wands and scrolls and such.  We also found a Ring of Protection that we gave to Copoc immediately.  As of this point, we had found a good but of loot, but not the thing we were here to find.  We had not found the Wyrd.We started down the south leading passageway, and I detected a great deal of magical effects there.  It seems as if there were 5 different magical runes on the wall of the passage leading to a door at the end.  The first was a Rune of Death.  Yow!  I managed to dispel it, after some effort.  We decided that since there was no real rush that wee were dealing with, that we would take as many days as it took to dispel the runes as we went down the hall.   Over the course of the next two days, I dispelled a Rune of pain, a Rune of Insanity, a Rune of Fear, and lastly, another Rune of Death.  Finally, on the door at the end of the hall was an Arcane lock spell, which I also dispelled.We entered a cavern that glittered with a strange crystal.  We knew we were in the right place.  All of our magical effects worked in the cavern, but you couldn’t detect them.  Very powerful stuff.  In the center of the cavern was a small pool of liquid.  It did not radiate magic, but it glowed with a blue light.  This was obviously the Wyrd.  None of us three could get any use from it, but to a Sorcerer, this stuff is priceless.  We retrieved a small cask from our camping supplies and ladled the Wyrd into it.  Once the cask was full, we plugged it up and stuck it in my magical haversack, which is really quite handy.  Finally we were done being grave robbers, and we could get to tracking down these Yuan-ti creatures that the others had told me about.  We decided that we would bring a cart from the village up here, and cart away all the books and scrolls back to Haradrak to sell…</blockquote>

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