Duergar & Daemons (Being a Sequel to An Adventure in Five Acts) [Updated] [6/16/25]

[ilgatto]

Duergar & Daemons
Part I: In Search of Adventure​

In which the players and the DM agree that our noble heroes did not venture into the mountains after all but rather made camp a short distance from Albert Murphy’s hideout; that Sir Oerknal has been catatonic ever since he set foot in the hideout because the player has left the building; and that the chevalier has taken to sleigh rides on the Icy Waste in his new plate armor and fur cloak.

Day 26: We find Navarre, Sir Eber, and Sir Oengus looking at the clouds coming in over the mountains as they have breakfast in their camp.
“No large battles for the time being,” Sir Eber says, turning to his noble fellows.
“Well spoken, Sir,” Navarre replies, grinning.
Some distance below, the chevalier passes in his sleigh, striking gallant poses.
“Je suis aventurier!,” he cries, waving at his noble companions.
“What ponce is this?,” Sir Eber scoffs.
“Best leave him to it,” Navarre replies. “Besides, he has a point… of sorts. Are we not all ‘adventurers’ now? Is this how such roving men and women are born? I have to admit that returning home seems to have lost some of its meaning. Too much has happened in the past couple of ten-days.”

Day 28: That morning, Sir Suvali has returned with new supplies.
“Messieurs!,” the chevalier declares, rising to his feet after a couple of glasses of Lillac. He strikes a splendid figure in his new plate armor and fur cloak. “We need a plan de campagne!”
“Hear, hear!,” Navarre agrees. He, too, is enjoying some Lillac.
“I must heal,” Sir Eber says.
“Indeed, mon ami, indeed!,” the chevalier says, waving a hand. “Eh, bien! Do we go home or venture forth?”
“The source of evil is in that cave,” Sir Eber says. “Our place is here.”
“Are you suggesting that this ‘evil presence’ is actually behind the revolution?,” Navarre asks, emptying his glass.
“I don’t think Albert Murphy is ‘evil’ as such,” Sir Eber says. “After all, the man dined at your table.”
“Har, har,” Navarre says. “Why speak of ‘evil’, then?”
“We must fight evil wherever it is,” Sir Eber says. “And it is in that cave.”
“My dear fellow,” Navarre says. “Need I remind you that there is a war going on beyond these mountains?”
“Yes, yes,” the chevalier interrupts. “That is all as may be. But surely you are not suggesting we wait for you to regain your strength dans la gueule du diable? The place doesn’t agree with me at all!”
“Scared, Sarazin?,” Sir Eber says, glowering at the chevalier.
“Pas du tout, mon cher! Pas du tout!,” the chevalier says, perhaps just that little bit too fast. “It is just…”
“Gentlemen,” Sir Suvali interrupts. “We can camp in the smithy down there. Albert Murphy was in there so I think we can safely assume that it is free from the evil influence of the pit. I do not feel much for staying out here while we wait for Sir Eber’s wounds to heal.”
“Although I think your reasoning is flawed, I must admit that I’d rather spend the next days close to a fire in a smithy than out here,” Navarre says.
“So it is agreed,” the sorcerer says, getting to his feet. “Gentlemen, back to the cave.”

And so our noble heroes return to the cave in the rift, where the DM doesn’t say anything about eerie atmospheres. They light fires and make themselves comfortable. When breakfast is boiling in a kettle over one of the fires, Navarre has another good look down the pit Sir Eber has dubbed ‘the source of evil’.
He shivers involuntarily.
“Indeed,” he muses to Sir Suvali next to him. “One has to admit that it does have a certain… disturbing quality.”
“It’s not the pit,” the sorcerer says, after intently staring down the hole for a round or two. “It’s the wall.”
“Even so,” Navarre says, as he looks around the cave once more. “This whole place has a strange feel to it.”

The noble duo return to the smithy, where Sir Eber, nestled in furs, has started carving a three-faced icon out of a log. After breakfast, the chevalier puts away his armor, with which he has been tinkering ever since he took it from the dead halberdier.
“Messieurs,” he says. “A plan de campagne is in order. Eber, you have suffered greatly and we should return to Diamond Castle as soon as you feel up to traveling. You can recuperate in all comfort there while we discuss our options before we return here to eradicate the evil root and branch.”
“Why wait?,” Navarre asks. “Suvali can use his wand and we can be in the castle in hours.”
“Impossible!,” the sorcerer all but interjects. “The wand has no more charges left.”
“Indeed?,” Navarre asks. “It no longer functions?”
Sir Eber coughs loudly.
“Two days and I’ll be as good as new,” he says.
“Excellent!,” Sir Suvali says, pouncing on the chance to change the subject. “Then it is settled. Gentlemen! Eber will sleep for two days. After that, I suggest we either go rimward to the spot marked “X” on the new map or enter the tunnel in the pit.”
“I say we start where we are,” the chevalier says. Apparently, he has had a change of heart.
“You are probably right,” Navarre muses. “If there really is some great evil down there that has led to this ‛revolution’, it may be worth exploring. Besides, I’d rather not leave it festering if we would venture into the unknown. If only to avoid having to face it if we should have to make a hasty retreat.”
“We will stay here for two days in any case,” Sir Suvali says.

The next two days are spent in relative peace and quiet. The fires are kept burning, Eber is fed hot soup, and Navarre and the chevalier repeatedly venture onto the Icy Waste to hunt show hares. On one of these trips, when they are discussing the notion that they may truly be adventurers now, Navarre admits that he is somewhat at a loss as to what to do next. The whole episode with the entire nobility of the realm fleeing Diamond Castle instead of fighting alongside our noble heroes still weighs heavily on his mind and the events of the last couple of ten-days seem to have shaken the very foundations of the world he thought he knew. Ice giants? Sea ships? Flying apparatuses? Icy Wastes? A revolution? Our noble hero cannot help but feel that things will never be the same again and that there is something he must do.
But what? Surely he cannot return home to his old life as if nothing has happened? Should he venture into a tunnel leading deep into the earth to confront some ‘source of evil’? Is this ‘evil’ a threat to The Forest? Was it the reason Albert Murphy did what he did? Shouldn’t he somehow start preparing the duchies for an uncertain future?
When the noble duo get back to the cave, Sir Suvali approaches and suggests using chains to stop whatever may come from behind the bricked-up wall in the pit. However, he puts forth an exceedingly complex plan while remaining vague on details and so the only thing Navarre takes away from it is that the bricked-up hole seems to be too small to allow an ice giant easy access.

Olaf has adapted remarkably well to the new situation. Indeed, the ruffian seems to relish in it, pulling his weight when required and proving quite capable of following orders. Our noble heroes have spoken to him in earnest and he has told them that he doesn’t care whom he serves as long as he gets paid. When Navarre reminded him of his misdeeds and that no monetary payments were to be expected, the bandit lord was quick to state that he didn’t mind serving nobles at all and that, in fact, it made for a nice change to associating with villains and bandits.
“Alright,” Navarre said, warily eyeing the lout. “You can start by telling us all you know about this ‘revolution’ of yours.”
And so our noble heroes learned that Serena the Bandit Queen and her bandits attacked Diamond Castle to gain control of the diamond mine, that they were defeated, and that the survivors – among them Serena – were imprisoned. Soon after, when Duke Blurh and his entire family had ‘died of food poisoning’, the miners rebelled. The bandits took their side and eventually the battle was won when Blurh’s personal guards started fighting among themselves and some of them joined the rebels.
Some time before all this, Albert Murphy, Blurh’s chief engineer, had become involved in a mining accident. A tunnel had collapsed with him in it and it took the miners some days to get to him. When they finally reached him, he spoke of experiencing a vision while he was trapped.
“I told you,” Sir Eber said. “There is something evil down there. The tunnel must lead to the mine.”
“He went away after this, off into the mountains,” Olaf continued. “He was gone for a long time and returned with the ice giant.”
“So the rebels took the castle before Albert Murphy returned from the mountains?,” Navarre asked. “Are you telling me that it was not Albert Murphy who started this ‘revolution’?”
“I suppose there’s many ways of looking at it,” Olaf said, shrugging. “The people revolted. Albert Murphy was there.”
“Preposterous!,” Navarre exclaimed. “Why would the people ‘revolt’? What have we ever done to them? For Olm’s sake! We are their protectors!”
“There may still be a connection,” Olaf said. “The mine had become less productive. Water had been seeping into it for a couple of years. Albert Murphy came up with all kinds of inventions and apparatuses to deal with the problem. Boiled the water to get rid of it, I think. Lots of steam.”
“And you were involved in all this?,” Sir Eber asked.
“Not at all!,” Olaf hasted to say. “I am only small fry, not important at all!”
“So what was it that you did do?,” Sir Eber asked.
“I was Serena’s assistant,” Olaf said, after only the slightest of hesitations.
“It is good of you to speak the truth, my good fellow,” Navarre said. “It is the best way forward at moments like this.”
“Yeah, well, the New Order hasn’t been much of a success,” Olaf said, shrugging again. “It was probably unwise to join forces with them in the first place.”
“You learn fast, monsieur,” the chevalier said. “Admirable! Et alors… you can keep the fires burning and take charge of the kitchens. Good for morale and all that.”
“No problem,” Olaf said.
And that was that.

Day 30: That morning, Sir Suvali calls his noble companions to council.
“Gentlemen,” he says, in his usual methodical manner. “The chance that something will strike fear into our hearts in the pit over there is real. We must decide how to deal with this.”
“Someone must remain up here to intercept those who start running,” Sir Eber says. “Maybe the runners just need to ‘sit it out’? Maybe they can enter without problems when they’ve calmed down.”
“I shall commit myself to this task,” the chevalier says, perhaps rather more quickly than he would have liked.
“How would you stop them?,” Navarre asks. “What if they become violent?”
“Let them go,” Sir Suvali says. “I will stay up here. I can easily keep up with people fleeing the cave. I can fly.”
“Is there anything in that rift we should know about?,” Navarre asks Olaf.
“I don’t know,” Olaf replies. “Murphy brought us here. We didn’t have much time before you lot showed up. My lord.”

Now, Sir Suvali comes up with another of his complicated plans, explaining who will enter what, when, and where; who will use and tie which ropes when and to what; and who will remain where in the cave with which ladders, either leaving or dropping them at certain locations and/or pulling them up, all depending on a whole range of different situations.
“Right,” Sir Eber cuts in at some point. He isn’t back to his full hit points yet but that doesn’t seem to bother him. “I’m going in.”
He gets to up and starts down the ladder, mumbling something like ‘yadda yadda yadda’ under his breath. When he is halfway into the pit, he lights a torch and casts it onto the floor close to the bricked-up wall, then continues his descent.
“You do what you just said,” Navarre says to Sir Suvali and looking at the pit. “We cannot leave him down there on his own.”
He rises and gets to the pit, where he starts climbing down the ladder as the others take up positions at the edge of the pit and knock arrows to their bows. When our noble hero gets to the brick wall, Sir Eber has just ceased trying to hammer his giant crowbar between the bricks. He looks rather pale and Navarre imagines he does, too, as he has started experiencing definite feelings of unease.
“I feel sick,” Sir Eber says, straightening his back.
“Can’t say I’m feeling too spiffy myself, old boy,” Navarre replies, righting himself just that little bit more.
Both are now gritting their teeth as waves of fear and nausea overwhelm them. Each not wanting to be the first to give in, the noble duo clench their teeth – which is now the only thing they can do to stop themselves from shaking and running away screaming.
“Allô? Tout va bien down there?,” the chevalier sings from above.
“We’re having a bit of a moment down here,” Sir Eber manages to grunt.
A strange, subtle, indefinable smell now prevails in the pit – seemingly causing the feelings of ill ease. Mustering all of his strength, Sir Eber puts a rag in front of his mouth.
“…,” Navarre mutters feebly through clenched teeth in an attempt at light banter. “…brigandry.”
“Quoi?,” the chevalier hollers. “What was that?”
Then, Navarre is the first to give in.
“I will NOT go in there,” he grunts, exhaling sharply and starting for the ladder. “I’m getting out. Clear my head.”
He climbs the ladder and heads for the exit, where he sits down and waits for the fear and nausea to pass. Back in the cave, the chevalier starts down the ladder.
“Mais c’est quoi, ici?,” he asks, when he reaches Sir Eber.
“Ah!,” he exclaims, when he misses his saving throw. “Oui!… Eh… je comprend! Eh, bien! Best get out of here, quoi?”
“Each his own way,” Sir Eber groans, still refusing to move.
Within seconds, the chevalier is up the ladder again.
“C’est dangereux là-bas!,” he cries to Sir Suvali and Sir Oengus, moving away from the pit at speed.
“I have sailed the seven rivers,” Sir Oengus declares. “It’ll take more than some bricks to scare me!”
“Non!,” the chevalier cries. “Mon ami! Don’t do it! I advise against it! We need to discuss tactics!”
“Scupper that,” Sir Oengus says and he starts climbing down the ladder.
Of course, Sir Oengus ‘Moon’ of Nisibis passes his saving throw. He reaches Sir Eber, who still hasn’t moved an inch, and takes the giant crowbar from him.
“It’ll be alright, matey,” he says to the ranger, as he starts hammering the crowbar into the wall.

And then, finally, Sir Eber also gives in. He runs for the ladder, is back in the cave in seconds and throws up when he reaches Navarre at the exit. Navarre gets to his feet and tries to assume an air of nonchalance. He still doesn’t feel anything close to wanting to return to the pit but he is determined to make the best of it now that Sir Eber has also given up. Our noble heroes throw each other some glances, pose for a bit, attempt to keep their cool. After some of this, Navarre is the first to speak.
“Olm be damned!,” he cries. “I’m going back in! You coming?”
Sir Eber starts tearing up a piece of soft cloth and hands it to Navarre before stuffing his nose with the bits he has torn off. Noses thus plugged, the noble duo return to the pit, fail their saving throws and are back up the ladder again, now, of course, utterly unwilling to EVER get back in there again because role-playing. Tiresome effect, fear.

Anyway. Eventually, we find Sir Oengus, Sir Suvali, and Sir Eber at the bottom of the pit, with Navarre and the chevalier up in the cave, the latter with his bow ready to fire. When Sir Oengus has created a large enough opening in the wall, a 7-foot-tall creature made of ice and snow emerges from a tunnel behind it. It has spindly, dangling limbs ending in huge, sharp claws; pointed ears; and a ferret-like face with sharp features and an evil grin.
Sir Oengus takes only a second to react.
“Ice creat-u-u-u-u-u-u-res!,” he yells, running toward the ladder.
Sir Eber retreats behind a pile of rime-covered chains some yards back and draws his weapons. Up in the cave, Navarre the chevalier start firing bolts and arrows at the creature – which don’t seem to affect it at all. The creature reaches Sir Oengus and starts clawing at him, hitting him in the process. Our noble hero feels a wave of cold run through his body and he has to stop moving because of it. Brutally pushing past him, Sir Suvali starts climbing the ladder in great haste.
“Thanks a bundle, fella!,” Sir Oengus yells after the fleeing sorcerer.
But now Sir Eber is moving again. He grabs Sir Oengus and hauls him to the ladder.
“Ho!,” the latter groans, teeth chattering. “We gonna deal with it or we not gonna deal with it?”
Although the missiles fired by Navarre and the chevalier do not seem to affect it, the ice creature does now shrink back from them, allowing Sir Eber to start pushing Sir Oengus up the steps.
“Aye, aye, captain!,” Sir Oengus says. “I get it! We’re going! Ho! Much as I like yer hand on me arse, methinks I’ll as prefer to get up there meself, ye rapscallion!”
Behind them, the ice creature is now retreating – perhaps it doesn’t want to venture too far from the tunnel? Or maybe it still fears the bolts and arrows coming from above even though none of them have actually harmed it?
“What in the name of Olm is that thing?,” Navarre asks, when Sir Eber and Sir Oengus are back in the cave and the ladder has been pulled up.
“Can’t say as to be sure,” Sir Oengus says. “Ice cold its touch be, though, no doubt about that!”
“It is an ice troll,” Sir Suvali says, lowering the ladder back into the pit again. “Made of ice. Its icy touch burns with cold.”
“And what are you doing?,” Sir Eber barks.
“We’ll heat something up and throw it at him,” the sorcerer says.
“Okay,” the ranger says. “We can use our fire bombs.”
“Good thinking, old boy!,” Navarre exclaims, remembering storming Albert Murphy’s tower with the ranger.
“You get back down and lure it out of the tunnel,” Sir Suvali says. “I’ll try and stop it from fleeing again from up here.”
Eyeing the glib sorcerer with barely veiled disgust, Navarre starts for the kitchen and returns moments later with some burning logs and oil-drenched rags, which he tosses into the pit
“Fire burns,” Sir Eber says. “It worked the last time.”
“Let’s go!,” Navarre says, a bit louder than he would have liked.

 

[ilgatto]

Duergar & Daemons
Part I: In Search of Adventure – Continued​

And so Sir Eber and Navarre climb back into the pit, put their swords and two torches on the floor and wait, their backs against the wall, for the ice troll to come charging out of the tunnel. And sure enough, it does. The chevalier shoots at it twice, hitting it once – to some effect even. With Sir Oengus readying a kettle with boiling water and Sir Suvali executing some intricate maneuver with some ropes in an attempt to entangle the ice troll and failing, Navarre lights and throws the first of his fire bombs at the monster, hitting it full on – and now a loud hissing happens when the creature actually seems to start melting. Eber lights his bomb, rolls a “1”, slips, and all but drops the thing, hitting the wall behind him and forcing him and Navarre to jump clear of the spreading flames.

But now the ice troll starts back to the tunnel, hissing and blowing steam and frantically trying to douse the burning oil on its body. Navarre misses it with his second bomb but Sir Eber does hit it and now the ice troll is seriously melting. Taking this as his cue, the chevalier starts down the ladder.

Navarre throws his third bomb and misses again, as Sir Eber hits the monster again with his – and it’s a good’un! The ice troll is now almost wholly ablaze and all it can do now is flail about with its arms as it weakly stumbles into the tunnel.

When the chevalier fails his saving throw and flees back up the ladder again, Navarre and Sir Eber pick up their swords, advance, and finally pass their saving throws. They charge after the ice troll into the tunnel until Navarre takes a mighty swing at it – but he only manages to land a glancing blow while Sir Eber does not hit it at all. But now, still burning, the ice troll does finally sag to the floor, where it melts away and the flames die.

The tunnel is about two and half yards in diameter and it gradually widens into what seems to be a larger room several yards away.
“Take this,” Sir Suvali says, extending two burning torches as he stands in the opening of the tunnel. Navarre takes a few steps back, takes the torches and advances again. He hands a torch to Sir Eber and the noble duo slowly move toward the larger room. They soon come upon what appear to be four bodies on the floor – the frozen corpses of stocky, bearded creatures in black metal chain mail armor. Our noble heroes subject them to a cursory inspection.
“They must be the smiths from upstairs,” Sir Suvali says behind them.
“You think?,” Navarre wonders. “What are they anyway? Dwarves?”
“They seem small enough,” Sir Eber says. “Interesting armors.”
“I say we see what’s what up there first,” Navarre says, nodding to where the tunnel – or room – seems to continue. He has grown tired of failing saving throws and doesn’t want to get back to the others and risk having to make one all over again when he has to get back into the tunnel. He moves further into the room, Sir Eber and Sir Suvali right behind him. A second opening seems to be in the wall at the other end of the room.
“Ahoy!,” Sir Oengus’ voice comes from behind.
“Ahoy!,” Navarre yells back. “We’re still alive!”
“Let’s go,” he says to Sir Eber as he starts for the second opening. “I want to know what’s down there.”
“What’s with the sudden urge to lead?,” Sir Eber asks. “Let’s wait for the others.”
“They’ll be here soon enough,” Navarre says, moving into the dark tunnel. “Let’s continue at a slow pace.”
“Is it safe?,” the voice of chevalier comes from far, far away.
“Yes!,” Sir Suvali yells, following Sir Eber into the tunnel.

And so the chevalier enters the pit, fails his third saving throw and starts up the ladder again in great haste.

Moving further into the tunnel, Navarre and Sir Eber notice something sparkle in the distance. Ice? Crystals? Advancing cautiously, they reach another cave-like room, this one wholly covered in ice and icicles and with several large, crystalline, vine-like plants filling most of it, everything sparkling in the light of their torches like a winter wonderland. Holding their breath in wonder, the noble duo exchange some glances until they notice the nauseating stench again.
“Is it the plants?,” Sir Eber asks.
“It would seem so,” Navarre returns, scanning the floor ahead. “I see no corpses or anything.”
Without stepping into the room, he has a closer look at the plants.
“I say!,” he all but whispers after a moment. “The plants bear fruit. What are they? Apples? Globules?”
“Best be careful,” Sir Eber says. “Plants can be dangerous.”

Navarre hurls his torch into the cave, hitting one of the plants. Several of the globules explode, releasing a crystalline powder that all but instantly fills the cave. Several saving throws must be rolled, most of which Sir Eber and Navarre fail. At the same time, an unearthly, insane scream comes from somewhere behind them.
“Get back!,” Navarre yells, shivering to the bone and struggling to wrestle past the ranger behind him, who is trying to wrestle past Sir Suvali in turn. “Get back!”
Unable to see much with but a single torch at their disposal, the noble duo stumble back through the tunnel, back into the pit, past Sir Oengus, and up the ladder again. Sir Eber runs to the smithy and starts rinsing his mouth with water, coughing, gagging, and throwing up again. Navarre decides to do the same, even though he doesn’t quite know why.

Come to think of it… there is little else he seems to know. What is he doing here? Who are these people? Who am I? What is that creature cowering in the corner over there? Why is that ruffian shouting at me?
“Lord! Lord!,” the ruffian yells. “It’s your Oerknal! He’s gone mad!”
Navarre has to sit down for a bit and notices that the big man next to him does the same – a look of wonder in his eyes.
“He started screaming!,” the ruffian yells, pointing at a squat creature cowering in a corner. “What in Ulm’s name is going on?”

Back in the tunnel, Sir Suvali has somehow managed to cause the explosion of at least one of the other fruits. Obviously having passed his saving throws, he is presently moving across the room. Sir Oengus is behind him and there are no more explosions, although the plants do move to ‘face him’ when he passes.

It takes Sir Eber and Navarre some time to gather their wits and, when they do, Olaf tells them that Sir Oerknal suddenly started screaming and then became catatonic again. Our noble heroes try to get the creature to tell them what happened but they do not get a reaction of any kind.
“Take care of him while we’re gone,” Sir Eber says, lighting a torch. “We may be a while.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Olaf says, glancing uneasily at Sir Oerknal.

When the noble duo leave the smithy, they run into the chevalier.
“You coming?,” Sir Eber asks.
“You will not get me into that tunnel if seven elephants would drag me!,” the infuriated chevalier fumes.
It just doesn’t seem to be his day.

Fortunately, Navarre and Sir Eber do not have to pass saving throws when they enter the tunnel again and they reach the room with the frozen dwarves without incident.
“Areu!,” Navarre yells into the darkness ahead. “Chaps! You in there?”
“We’re past the plants!,” Sir Suvali’s voice comes from far ahead. “Move very slowly! That works!”
“They froze to death,” Sir Eber says, on his knees next to one of the corpses. “They have no wounds. Maybe the evil force causes catatonia in all dwarves? It would explain what happened to Oerknal.”
“Perhaps they came prepared,” Navarre muses, shining his lantern at another corpse. “Any strange items on them? Witch brews?”
The noble duo investigate the corpses for a bit and then Navarre spots a puddle of water creeping past him on the floor in the direction of the room with the crystalline plants. He wonders why it hasn’t frozen – and why it is moving at all – and then Sir Eber also notices it.
“The remains of the ice troll,” he says. “Torch it!”
He puts his torch to the puddle, which hisses and steams until it is gone.
“What is this place?,” Navarre wonders, shaking his head as the weird events keep unfolding. “What is this world?”
“The ice troll may have a connection with the plants down there,” Sir Eber says. “I’ve heard stories.”
Thus confronted with yet another weird phenomenon, Navarre shakes his head again and turns his attention to the corpses once more.

Not long before this, further down the tunnel and past the room with the crystalline plants, Sir Suvali and Sir Oengus reach another cave-like room, this one with several low, ridge-like sections running across the width of the floor. In the room are four ice trolls, smaller than the one that was killed earlier, with the largest standing only some three feet tall and the others about two feet each. When they spot the noble duo, the smaller two panic and start clambering over the ridges to get away from them.
“We mean no harm,” Sir Suvali says, gesturing at the larger ice troll with his torch and advancing slowly. The creature hesitates for a second but then panics and attacks. Reacting quickly, the sorcerer tries to push his torch into its face fails and then Sir Oengus starts hacking away at it, landing a mighty blow that actually makes a part of the creature break off.

Back in the first room, Navarre and Sir Eber have not found anything on the dwarves that looks like it could provide them with some protection from the crystalline plants. They did find several items of the same strange, black metal the chain mail armors are made of, most notably hammers and a crowbar.
“They were looted,” Sir Eber says. “No money, no nothing. Only things of little value or too inconvenient to take along.”
“Still, these items are of some quality,” Navarre remarks, inspecting one of the hammers. “I do not believe I have ever seen such quality in metalwork.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Sir Eber says, adding a hammer and the crowbar to his ever-growing collection of strange tools.
“Anyway. They have nothing that could get us past the plants. Let’s torch the cave before we move through.”
Our noble heroes drench some pieces of cloth in oil, put them to flame and toss them into the room with the crystalline plants, hurl the half-empty bottle of oil after them for good measure, and start for the room with the corpses at speed as muted explosions sound behind them.

When they return to the room with the crystalline plants some ten minutes later, they find the air full of ice crystals. They watch the room for some time and presently conclude that all of the globules have exploded.
“After you, old boy,” Navarre says. “Wouldn’t want to keep you from leading from time to time”.
The ranger grunts and steps into the room. When he gets to the exit on the other side, nothing much has happened.
“I’m thr-ou-ou-gh!,” he croons.
Minutes later, Navarre has also crossed the room. The crystalline plants did not react much, although they still moved to ‘face him’ when he passed them.

Further ahead, Sir Suvali and Sir Oengus have managed to kill the larger ice troll. However, the fight has not been without consequence for Sir Oengus, who is now quite badly hurt. With the smaller ice trolls still falling over each other to get to safety, the noble duo move on.
“Areu!,” comes Navarre’s voice. “You still alive up there?”
“Ice trolls!,” Sir Suvali yells. “Small ones! You can avoid them!”
“Why didn’t you kill them?,” Sir Eber hollers.
But the sorcerer does not answer and when Navarre and Sir Eber reach the cave with the cowering ice trolls, the former once more shakes his head in wonder. Do ice trolls actually have children?
“Hello?,” he hollers to the creatures, approaching cautiously and keeping them in the light of his lantern. “Do you speak? Can you hear me?”
The ice trolls do not respond. When they see their way clear, they scamper past the noble duo and run off to the room with the crystalline plants – or whatever is now left of them.

All the way back up in Albert Murphy’s cave, the chevalier takes a deep breath and enters the pit again. He finally passes his saving throw and reaches the room with the four corpses. When he searches the bodies and finds nothing of any apparent value, he murmurs to himself in disappointment before he decides to pocket one of the hammers anyway. He calls to his noble fellows, hurries through the room with the damaged crystalline plants and the cowering ice trolls and eventually catches up with the others in the room with the ridges.
Reunited, our noble heroes follow the tunnel for some time. It seems to them that they are moving ever deeper into the earth and they notice numerous strange elevations in floor and ceiling at regular intervals, a hundred yards or so between each. Proceeding with caution, our noble heroes discuss the phenomenon and everything else that has happened today. They recall some of the older stories their nannies and aunts told them when they were children, which speak of the people of The Forest having ‘fled from the darkness on “boats” before they came to The Forest’. Other stories, fairy tales rather than of any historical significance, speak of a place called ‛the Underdark’, a fey, underground realm that is supposed to be the home of dwarves and gnomes.
“Quite,” Navarre says at some point. “Are we in this ‘Underdark’? Dwarven corpses? I do declare! Are we to believe that fairy tales are true? Dragons? Elves? Griffins? Do they all exist down here?”
“Of course they do,” Sir Suvali says irritably.
“Dwarves exist in any case,” Sir Eber says. “I’ve always known.”
“Have you?,” Navarre wonders. “How so?”
“Have you forgotten Oerknal?,” Sir Eber asks. “He is a dwarf.”
Navarre looks at his noble fellow in utter astonishment. The thought had never crossed his mind.

A closer inspection of the strange elevations does not reveal any clues as to what they might be. Where they occur, there are no differences in the bedrock.
“Perhaps they were made by a large worm,” Sir Eber suggests at some point. “Earthworms do the same.”
“I’d say that’s a bit strong even for a faerie world,” Navarre says, albeit rather weakly.

Our noble heroes continue down the tunnel for about an hour until they reach a fissure of some sort.
“There seems to be no end to this place,” Navarre says, shining his lantern across the fissure and seeing that the tunnel continues beyond it.
“Back to the smithy,” the sorcerer says. “We have to prepare for this.”

When our noble heroes get back to the smithy, they discuss the events of the day.
“The tunnel leads to the mountains,” Sir Suvali says at some point.
“Does it?,” Navarre wonders. “I somehow gathered that it would take us to this ‛Icy Waste’. Strange worlds leading to strange worlds and all that.”
“It could have been a worm,” Sir Eber says once again. “Worms retract and extend their bodies when they move through the earth. Maybe this one uses its body as some sort of coil.”
“The worm came from the hole in the pit,” the chevalier says at this, obviously lost in thought and otherwise quite inebriated. “Then it went into the rift. It is a Primordial Beast.”
Nobody is really sure what he is on about and then the DM volunteers that ‘the dwarves also came from the tunnel’.

This seems to herald the end of the session and so our noble heroes subject the armors and weapons they found to a closer inspection. Navarre tries on one of the dwarven armors and concludes that it is a bit of a tight fit but that he can wear it after some minor adjustments. It is about 10% lighter than his own armor.
“Can’t say that I’ve seen anything like it,” he says, as he continues to inspect the armor. “A dwarven-forged armor. Has a certain ring to it, what?”
Sir Eber spends some time hitting another of the armors with his new hammer, finding that he cannot even scratch the metal.
“Looks like the armor and hammer cannot be damaged by anything,” he says.

 

[ilgatto]

Duergar & Daemons
Part II: Descent Into the Depths of the World​

In which the DM informs our noble heroes that they didn’t quite make it back to the cave and smithy yet.

Day 30, continued: Our noble heroes are just past the room with the crystalline plants when a light approaches and Olaf comes running, obviously in some distress.
“Dukes!,” he yells. “My lords! The Oerknal started screaming again and now he's gone!”
“Pull yourself together, man!,” Navarre says to him. “Gone how? Surely he did not disappear into thin air?”
“I didn’t see! He was screaming and now he is gone!”

When our noble heroes do get back to the smithy Sir Oerknal is nowhere to be seen. Olaf really doesn’t seem to know where the creature… dwarf went and so Sir Eber starts looking for any tracks he may have left. This takes some time but he finally concludes that Sir Oerknal seems to have gotten up and walked right up to a wall some distance rimward of the smithy, where all traces of him disappear.
“Over here,” he calls, as he starts inspecting the wall.
“What is it?,” Navarre asks when he joins him. “A secret door?”
“Looks like it.”
Navarre has a look for himself but rolls a “3” and finds nothing. Pity, he would have to liked to have expanded on his success in the Great Hall in Diamond Castle.
“Found it,” Sir Eber says, rolling a “1”.
“Mon Dieu!,” the chevalier exclaims.
The ranger starts pushing against the wall and then a section of it moves back and then all the way to the left, revealing a dark corridor, high enough for humans to stand in comfortably – one has to ask these days. About halfway up the wall at the other end some things seem to glitter and glisten in an alcove.
Navarre follows Sir Eber into the corridor but then the chevalier pushes past him and hastens to the alcove with the glistening objects. Cautious as always, Navarre takes a few steps back and watches Sir Eber and the chevalier approach the alcove, fail a Dexterity check, utter some startled cries and disappear from sight.
“We will need more light,” our noble hero says to Sir Suvali and Sir Oengus next to him. “The chevalier and Sir Eber seem to have fallen into a pit down there.”

More light is brought and our noble heroes advance to where the ranger and the chevalier disappeared.
“Allô?,” comes the muffled voice of the chevalier. “We have found the King!”
“Well played, old sport!,” Navarre yells back at him. “Hold on while we try and get you out of there.”
Sir Suvali subjects the floor to a closer inspection and finds that a section of it seems to pivot on a central axle.
“Belay a rope to me,” Sir Oengus says. “I’ll activate the trap and try and stop the swing.”
Not quite sure how his noble fellow intends to achieve this, Navarre starts for the smithy to get a rope. When he returns, Sir Suvali is calling to the noble duo in the pit.
“Gentlemen!,” he hollers. “Do you hear me? We are getting you out!”
Now, the sorcerer comes up with yet another complicated plan, suggesting our noble heroes activate the trap and use an anvil on a chain to stop the trapdoor from swinging when it reaches its tipping point. Nobody has a clue as to what he is on about, not even the DM, and so the latter eventually decides that it takes our noble heroes about a turn to get the unfortunate trio out of the pit. The chevalier quickly inspects the alcove and is disappointed to find that it only contains some copper and glass trinkets.

When they find no other exits in the corridor, our nobles heroes are at a loss to explain its existence until Navarre has another look at the door. Could it, he wonders, conceal another exit? Beaming, the DM says yes.
“I suggest we close the door before we head into unknown territory,” Navarre says. “Just in case anything comes from that pit while we’re in here.”
“No,” Sir Suvali says. “We may not be able to open it again.”
Navarre is about to suggest leaving someone on the other side of the door, when Sir Oerknal comes round.
“What happened to you?,” Sir Eber asks.
“I don’t know,” the dwarf stammers. “I just saw the door and had to push it. I saw the gold and then everything went black.”
“And before that?,” Navarre asks. “Why the apathy…?”
His mind now going back to the first time he was informed that Sir Oerknal was catatonic, our noble hero’s voice suddenly trails off. What in Olm’s name is this? He cannot remember a thing since… since when? He struggles for a bit and then realizes that he cannot recall anything of what happened after he first came across the room with the crystalline plants. He starts back to the smithy.
“I say,” he says to Sir Suvali when gets there. “Could I have some of the novice’s salve?”
“It’s finished,” the sorcerer says. “There’s nothing left.”
“This is no time for flippancy, old boy,” Navarre says irritably. “I seem to have a gap in my memory and I want it gone.”
The sorcerer throws him a guarded glance.
“It’s true,” he says. “It’s finished. What… was that about your memory?”
As it turns out, Sir Suvali suffers from the same loss of memory. The noble duo discuss the matter for a bit until the sorcerer suggests not to mention any of it to the others until they know what ails them. They still decide to do something about it, though, and get back to the secret corridor, where their noble fellows have moved the door and revealed another corridor behind it.
“Take Oerknal back to the smithy,” Sir Eber says to Olaf. “And don’t let him run off again.”
And with that, he and the chevalier enter the second corridor, Sir Oengus right behind them.
“Hey!,” Sir Suvali yells at them. “Navarre and I are off to the cave with the ice plants!”
“Smartly now, lubbers!,” Sir Oengus hollers back, before disappearing into the corridor.

When Navarre and Sir Suvali reach the room with the crystalline plants, they cannot find any clues as to what happened to their memory, nor, indeed, any remedies. They do conclude that their minds seem to function normally in all respects, except where their (short-term?) memory is concerned. Presently the problem seems to have changed and they can now only remember what happened after they reached the room with the crystalline plants and nothing before that, right up until the moment they came down from the glacier and reached the rift. They do remember what happened before that as normal.
“The condition changes,” Sir Suvali says, as if it is up to him to define the problem.
“How’s about there are actually two things happening here?,” Navarre suggests. “One, the events in this room, and, two, something to do with the feelings of unease all of us seem to have ever since we came to this cave? Maybe Eber’s ‘source of evil’ has got something to do with some part of what’s happening?”
“I have no idea,” Sir Suvali says. “All I know is that I don’t like things, plants, people, or events affecting my mind. I rely on it and I don’t want to lose it.”
“Quite,” Navarre says. “I will write down the first thing I remember after we found the plants and the last thing after we found the rift. We’ll continue to check our memories to see if something changes. Perhaps the hiatus moves with time?”
The noble duo agree that this seems to be the best they can do at the moment and head back to the cave.

Some time before this, Sir Eber, Sir Oengus, and the chevalier have found the second corridor to be as wide as the first, with openings in the walls to each side. At the moment, the light of their torches and lanterns does not reach far enough to see all the way to the end. Cautiously moving forward, the noble trio enter the first opening to their left to find a smallish room, possibly an atelier of some sort. It is strangely empty and the ceiling is lower than that in the corridor. They subject the room to a cursory inspection and then the chevalier announces that he has discovered a hole in the wall opposite the entrance, which doesn’t bother his noble fellows much. First, the wall he is talking about is directly between the room and the smithy and, second, they have their own discoveries to attend to. Indeed, Sir Eber is currently inspecting a jar with a strange, glistening oil, of which he can make little else than that it resembles weapon oil.

With the noble trio engaged thusly, Sir Suvali and Navarre arrive. They are brought up to speed and, when everybody starts ‘experimenting with Sir Eber’s oil’, Navarre wanders off to have a look around on his own. He starts with the rooms opposite the atelier and finds them to resemble stables of some sort, their ceilings as high as in the atelier. Stables? For what? Ponies? Goats?
He shakes his head and starts for the next room and is about halfway into the corridor when he hears a swishing noise and several projectiles whiz past him. He tries to dive out of the way but cannot avoid being hit by one of them. He curses loudly and moves back down the corridor again, where he starts searching for the projectiles just when Sir Suvali emerges from the atelier.
“Blasted darts hit me,” Navarre says.
“Hold still so I can dress it,” the sorcerer says after he has had a look at the wound.
“Better watch your step, chaps!,” Navarre yells at his noble fellows in the atelier. “Things are not what they seem!”
“Retreating, Dauberval?,” Sir Eber grins, emerging from the atelier and seeing Navarre and the sorcerer in the entrance to the corridor.
“There are traps everywhere in the bloody place,” Navarre returns testily. “I will not jump across this one and end up in a pit like some of us.”
“I’ll take the lead then, shall I?,” Sir Eber grins.
“By all means, MON CHER!,” Navarre growls.
Sir Eber moves further down the corridor, the others watching him with some interest. No traps are sprung.
“So do these people jump across that trap whenever they have to get from here to there?,” Navarre asks angrily.
“Maybe there’s a lever somewhere to deactivate it,” Sir Oengus suggests.
Navarre decides to shut up.

Interrupting the proceedings, the chevalier announces that he didn’t move into the atelier at all but moved up the corridor long before all this and he presently hollers that he has found a door. He is peering into an opening in the left wall, up a flight of stairs ending in a small door. He stoops low and climbs the stairs until he reaches the door, which has a small stained glass window in it. He knocks on the door.
“Ah! Mes petits?,” he sings. “Cendrillon? Tu es là? I am coming in!”
He opens the door and enters the room of the seven dwarves but then with only some basics furnishings left in it and for only three dwarves, one of them very small. He rummages around for a bit but finds nothing that takes his fancy.
“Mais c’est le monde des gnomes!,” he murmurs, having a last look around before returning down the stairs.
“Fini,” he announces, when he gets back to the corridor where his noble fellows are waiting for him to finish taking up the DM’s time.
“We’ll move our camp in here,” Sir Suvali yells at his noble fellows from the entrance to the corridor.
“We’ll check this place for stuff and then head into the Underdark,” Sir Eber returns.
With this, he climbs a flight of stairs in the wall across from the room of the three dwarves and ends up in a storage room of sorts, remarkably chilly and with a low ceiling. He collects some pottery jars and returns to the corridor. Here, Navarre is still inspecting the spot where the darts were fired at him. When he finds nothing that would explain the event, he gingerly moves further into the corridor.

In the next half hour or so, our noble heroes find more small rooms, all empty like the ones they’ve found before. They find what must have been a pantry; a room containing mountains of small clumps of ore; and a room with piles of charcoal on the floor and featuring a chimney with some sort of vessel placed underneath it. Navarre, still somewhat concerned about his loss of memory, searches all rooms for things that might remedy the problem, without much hope of finding something – and rightly so as it turns out
At the end of the corridor is a large hole in the floor, with a metal bar running across it between two metal rings in the floor at each end. A bucket is on a long metal chain wound around the bar – a well. In the ceiling above it is another hole, while an opening in the wall to the left reveals a flight of stairs leading up. Using the bucket, Navarre retrieves some water from the well and finds it to be refreshingly cold – and so he and most of the others refresh their water supply.

Duringst the meanwhile, Sir Eber has returned to the smithy. He picks up Sir Oerknal, carries him to the room of the three dwarves and puts him in the smallest bed. The others are hardly aware of this until they suddenly hear Sir Oerknal crying like a child. They hurry to the room, where they find Sir Eber looking at the bawling dwarf.
“That bed was built for Oerknal when he was a baby,” he says.
Navarre looks at the ranger in surprise. He doesn’t say much, this fellow, but he does seem to grasp the gist of things rather quickly.

Not much later, we find Navarre back at the well and the chevalier up the stairs to the left, where the latter has found a gray cloth stretched across what must be a hole in the hubward wall, the stairs continuing further up. He informs Navarre of his find and presently throws an unlit torch at the cloth, which bounces back with some force. Intrigued – quite persistently so, it must be said – he starts prodding the cloth, reporting his findings to Navarre and some of the others, as people seem to be teleporting hither and to at the moment. Fighting the urge to define it as a filter of some sort, our noble heroes pretend to struggle with the function of the cloth for some time, until Sir Eber returns with a dustpan and brush and Navarre decides that the chevalier is wasting time and starts up the stairs himself – curious to find out where they lead. He passes his noble friend on his way up and has to climb a considerable distance until he reaches a hole in the wall. He looks into it and finds himself looking out over the icy rift. An air vent?

Below him, the chevalier is still prodding the tightly drawn cloth, convinced that it is not what the others are still trying not to tell him it is. He puts his back against the opposite wall, knocks an arrow and fires it at the cloth (from a distance just shy of two inches). Pouf! The arrow flies straight through the cloth, which doesn’t tear and release the tons of coal dust accumulated behind it – obviously much to the disappointment of the others – though enough dust escapes to blacken the chevalier’s face. Still not satisfied, he draws his knife and cuts the cloth – still no explosion of coal dust – although enough of the stuff has now escaped to wholly cover the intrepid chevalier.
“Mon Dieu!,” he exclaims, looking at his attire in alarm just when Navarre passes him on his way down.
“What are you doing, old fruit?,” the latter says, trying not to laugh too hard.
“There is something behind this cloth,” the chevalier insists.

Navarre shrugs and continues on his way down, leaving his noble friend to his antics. When he gets back to the corridor, Sir Oengus and the others have just discovered a hidden compartment in one of the walls. It contains a mechanism with more darts like the ones that were fired at Navarre earlier. The system appears to work on air pressure and it would seem that it can be reset by using a small bellows. The darts, twenty-four in number, are made of a strangely shiny, silvery metal and they are clearly of exceptional workmanship.

Our noble heroes discuss the cave and the secret complex for some time and Navarre once again marvels at the strange events of the last couple of days. Dwarves? Ice trolls? Plants made of ice? Tunnels to the Underdark? Traps? Ventilation systems with filters in them? Whatever will be next?
“Maybe there was a conflict here,” Sir Oengus suggests at some point. “Maybe the dwarves were faced with some enemy from below and grew the ice plants down there to protect them? Maybe they had to scupper and hide their kid on the surface and that’s where he was found by Eber’s people?”
“Hmm…,” Navarre says. “Then what is Eber’s ‘source of evil’? The plants? The ice trolls? Something even deeper down?”
“Could be any or all of that,” Sir Eber says.
“I suggest we instruct Olave to prepare a brunch,” the chevalier says, still covered in coal dust. “I could do with a stiff drink.”

And so we find our noble heroes – and Sir Oerknal, catatonic again – back in the smithy, where everybody has eaten and Navarre and the chevalier are enjoying some Lillac. Since some time has passed since his last visit to the room with the crystalline plants, Navarre has checked whether anything has changed as far as the gap in his memory is concerned – it hasn’t.
Sir Suvali has made a quick inventory and he informs his noble companions that there is food left for some two ten-days – one ten-day of rations and another of more palatable fare. He has also cast Detect Magic on everything that was found so far and informed his noble companions that the darts from the trap radiate auras of Enchantment and Alteration magic – whatever that may mean. Our noble heroes have managed to retrieve almost all of the darts, which means that they now have forty three darts +1. The sorcerer has also determined that Sir Eber’s oil has magical qualities as well.
“It imbues weapons with a magical aura,” he says. “It has a limited duration and should only be used in emergencies.”
“A magical aura?,” Sir Oengus asks. “What for?”
“We are entering a magical realm,” Sir Suvali says. “We may need magical weapons to affect some of the creatures we will find down there. That’s when the oil comes in.”
“Nice,” Sir Oengus says, nodding appreciatively. “What about the darts?”
“I think we can make them into tips for arrows and bolts,” Sir Eber says. “Won’t require much.”
“Gentlemen,” the sorcerer continues. “We will spend the night in the secret complex. We will enter the Underdark tomorrow.”

Navarre has to admit that the notion does have a certain ring to it.

 

[ilgatto]

Duergar & Daemons
Part II: Descent Into the Depths of the World – Continued​

Day 31: When he wakes up, Navarre checks his memory to find that nothing has changed. Annoyed, he joins the others at their breakfast. Sir Oerknal has woken up from his catatonic state again and says that he knows nothing of the cave and its secrets, except that he somehow ‘knew’ about the secret door and felt compelled to enter it. He also knows nothing of the dwarves who lived there, supposedly his parents. What he does say, is that the black metal armors and hammers found on the corpses belong to ‘other dwarves’.
“What’s that?,” Navarre asks. “Not you or your parents?”
“Naah,” Sir Oerknal says. “Not of my kind.”
“So there’s two different kinds of dwarves?,” Navarre wonders. “Whatever will be next?”
Our noble heroes spend the rest of the day preparing for their descent into the depths of the earth. Sir Eber also occupies himself with converting the magical darts to tips for arrows and bolts, handing out the finished products to those with weapons to fire them.

Day 32: Early in the morning, our noble heroes return to the tunnel to the Underdark. They have left Sir Oerknal in the smithy for technical reasons, with Olaf to take care of him.
Now fully geared up, it takes our noble heroes three hours to reach the fissure where they turned back last time. When they get to the other side, they find that the tunnel continues for some fifteen minutes before it opens into a small room where part of the ceiling has collapsed, forming a pile of rocks that takes up most of the floor. They cross the room and continue for another fifteen minutes until they reach a room wholly filled with rocks, like marbles in a bag.
“We’re going to have to squirm through like ants,” Sir Eber says, glancing at Navarre. “I’ll go first, then, shall I?”
“By all means, old boy,” Navarre replies, grinning. “I’ll be right behind you.”
The ranger starts wriggling through the rocks, trailing a rope and finding the going quite tough at first. He also has some trouble deciding which way to go until he notices a mark of some sort – perhaps a smear – first on one of the boulders and then on another. He follows the marks and eventually emerges in a tunnel at the other side of the room.
“Next!,” he yells. The others crawl through one by one and it takes the lot of them some fifteen minutes to join Sir Eber in the tunnel on the other side. Much to his chagrin, the chevalier has had to remove his plate armor and drag it along after him on another rope.
While he gets back into his armor, Sir Suvali and Sir Eber discuss the notion that the tunnel seems to be moving slightly to left, toward the mountains.
“Does that mean we are moving away from Diamond Castle and not towards it?,” Navarre asks.
“Looks like it,” the ranger says.
“So there is no link between here and the mine,” Navarre muses. “I wonder if that means that Albert Murphy did not connect with your ‘source of evil’ here.”
“Time will tell,” the ranger replies, shrugging.

Some twenty minutes later, at around half past ten in the morning, our noble heroes reach a point where the floor has collapsed, leaving a hole some three yards across and with the tunnel continuing on the other side. A lantern is tied to a rope and lowered into the hole, to reveal a small stream below, running perpendicular to the tunnel at the bottom of a narrow, lozenge-shaped tunnel.
“Mon Dieu!,” the chevalier cries, peering down into the hole. “Insects! Small spiders! Messieurs, there is life down there.”
“Indeed,” Navarre muses. “I somehow did not quite expect that.”
“There’s holes in the walls,” Sir Eber says, pointing at the left wall and taking his dwarven hammer from his belt. “There and there. Anchor points for a rope. Anyone got pinions?”
When it turns out that no one has thought to bring any, Sir Oengus suggests using the magical darts. But now Sir Eber tells the others to stand back. He moves back into the tunnel, runs back to the hole and jumps across – managing to do so only just. He is thrown one end of a rope and, after some effort, our noble heroes have created a rope bridge.
Navarre is the first on the bridge and he has a good look into the hole. Sticking his head down, he notices what can only be a vague glow in the distance to the right, perhaps best likened to the haziest of daylight on a foggy day. Still, it is a light, the first light not produced by him and his noble fellows he has seen since they entered the tunnels.
“There seems to be a light down here,” he says. “I say we go see what it is. A light in this dark world must be worth exploring, what?”
The others sort of agree and Navarre attaches his own rope to the rope bridge before tying it to his belt. Slowly, ever so slowly, he works himself into the lozenge-shaped tunnel, now dangling from the rope bridge like a pendulum. And sure enough, perhaps some one hundred to two hundred yards further downstream, he definitely sees a light, if only ever from the corner of his eye. All around him are the signs of life the chevalier mentioned – faint traces of webbing, tiny spiders, tiny flying insects, all of them white or perhaps translucent and only barely visible to the naked eye, especially in these conditions.
“I’m going in,” he announces, strangely enough to the considerable annoyance of his noble companions. “There is definitely a light down there.”

He lowers himself into the water, ever so careful, onto a bed of pebbles on the bottom, the water barely up to his ankles. He moves to a shallower area to the right and has a good look around with his lantern.
“It seems to be mostly granite down here,” he calls back to his noble fellows up in the tunnel. “I’ll see if I can get closer to the light.”
He unties the rope from this belt and starts moving, slowly, through both deeper and shallower parts of the stream, which barely has a flow to it. Even though the light doesn’t appear to get any closer – or perhaps because of it – he feels the tension rise. He experiences several ‘moments’ – he slips, stones and rocks falling; pebbles sliding underneath his feet; small eyeless snake- and scorpion-like creatures jumping into the water or crawling out of the way as he advances. Every now and then, he calls back to his noble fellows up in the tunnel, who have now started to cross the hole.
Navarre continues for about half an hour and then discerns what can only be a huge stone grating in a brick archway in a man-made wall of rocks and stones blocking the tunnel. Creeping closer in some considerable excitement, he notices what seems to be a thick layer of spider webbing on the other side of the grating, apparently even further reducing the brightness of an already weak light beyond it. He stares at the construct in wonder and trepidation, finding himself unsure of what to do. Spider webbing of these dimensions? Surely this ‛Underdark’ is not home to gigantic spiders? Then again, who’s to say it isn’t? Literally anything seems possible these days.

He advances a bit until he can clearly see the entire construct and notices a smaller, man-sized door in the grating.
“By Olm!,” he whispers. “Who lives here?”
He has a closer look at the smaller door and notices there's a handle on it. Now, he decides that he has to open the door – if only to avoid Sir Eber’s scathing comments when he would return and didn’t. He pulls the handle and a metal latch or small bar tumbles noisily onto the floor – obviously a part of a larger latch or bar. He manages to open the door with some effort, takes a deep breath, draws his dagger, cuts a small hole in the webbing and has a peek through.

He almost stops breathing when he sees a large, circular cavern formed in what must be pumice or perhaps coral. The walls are highly irregular, riddled with holes large and small. A hill-like section takes up most of the floor in the middle of the cavern and a huge, white, egg-like structure sits on top of it. The egg must be thirty yards across and at least thirty yards tall and much of its lower half is buried in the masses of fungi, lichen, molds, and mushrooms of all sizes that blanket the raised section. Traces of what must have been a path lead from a ways into the room up to the egg.
The raised section, or hill, is surrounded by a moat-like body of water right in front of him and reaching up to the outer walls of the cavern in most places. A short, submerged bridge leads across it from the grated door to the overgrown path. Plants, algae, kelp, and grasses grow and wave in the water and some large, pale fish dart about in it. The cavern seems to measure at least one hundred yards from one end to the other and perhaps two hundred to the ceiling. A faint, grayish twilight permeates the entire area and seems to come from somewhere on top of the egg. Indeed, the whole cavern and everything in it appears to be some shade of gray.
“What in Olm’s name is all this?,” our noble hero whispers.
Eager to tell the others, he hurries back to the rope bridge. When he is about halfway, he sees a light approach – his noble companions have gone after him when they no longer heard his hollering after some time.
“That you, mon gars?,” comes the voice of the chevalier from behind one of the lanterns.
“Friends!,” Navarre whispers, barely able to hide his excitement. “Follow me! You are not going to believe this!”

And so Navarre leads his noble fellows to the cavern with the huge egg, to their astonished exclamations. When the initial excitement has subsided, our noble heroes set their first tentative steps into the cavern, one by one, immediately noticing a raise in temperature – it must be about 8 °C in the cavern. Sir Eber crosses the submerged bridge and tries to identify the fungi on the hill, soon concluding that he does not recognize any of them. Sir Oengus tries to identify the fish in the moat and concludes that they must be large carp of some sort, entirely white and without eyes.

Sir Suvali only steps into the cavern after all of the others have entered. He unfolds his wings and starts for the ceiling, noticing that the walls glisten with water that comes trickling down them and creates the moat below – even more so than the stream coming from the tunnel.
Navarre is still trying to take in what he is seeing when he hears the sorcerer’s voice come from above.
“Gentlemen,” the sorcerer hollers. “There is a gate in the egg.”
“There is a what?,” Navarre exclaims.
“There are multiple gates in the egg,” the sorcerer says.

Always the first to charge into the unknown, Sir Eber starts moving up the hill, roughly along the overgrown path leading up to the egg. He hasn’t moved more than a couple of yards when he must roll d20 – apparently a ‘Perception Check’, whatever that may be – rolls a “1” and notices four small piles of stones to his left. Graves? He starts removing stones and soon uncovers what seem to be the mummified remains of a dwarf. When he starts digging into the second tumulus, both Navarre and the chevalier feel the need to protest.
“Monsieur,” the latter says frostily. “Is desecrating graves the right way to go about this?”
“They were buried in haste,” Sir Eber says, continuing to remove stones. “Picks, spears, shields, hauberks, no chain mails. All in a jumble. They seem small even for dwarves. Slim rather than sturdy like Oerknal.”
Pulling a face, the chevalier passes the ranger and advances up the garden path, noticing that there must be steps underneath the fungi, perhaps even between low walls to each side. He climbs some twenty yards until, sure enough, he arrives at one of the gates mentioned by Sir Suvali.
In front of him is a set of double doors, seemingly made of iron and dotted with a myriad of copper eyes that follow his every move.
“Eh…, allô?,” he says, his voice wavering ever so slightly. “Monsieur?”
When there is no answer, he has another look at the doors and notices that they are slightly ajar. When Navarre and Sir Oengus reach him, Sir Suvali, still in the air, informs them that there are eight gates in total.
“Do they have eyes?,” the chevalier asks.
“All of them,” the sorcerer yells. “I’ll see what that light on top is.”
He finds it to emanate from a hemispherical, crystalline sphere embedded in the top of the egg and reports his findings.

The chevalier puts his ear to one of the doors and, now, Navarre can constrain himself no longer.
“Do step aside,” he says impatiently, pushing past the chevalier and opening the doors. These move much more easily than he would have thought and he notices that a metal bar behind them has obviously been cut in half at some time.
And then, much to their astonishment, Navarre, Sir Oengus, and the chevalier see what can only be described as a street with buildings to the left and right and leading off toward the center of the egg. Although made of stone, the buildings have a strange, almost organic quality to them. There seem to be two of them to each side of the street, the ones closest to the ‘shell’ being taller than the ones further down the road. The buildings only have doors – no windows – and their walls feature runic pictoglyphs of some sort. The light is only marginally brighter here than outside but it is still grayish, like everything else inside the egg.
It’s a city.

“It’s a city!,” Navarre exclaims. “By Olm!”
Forgetting himself, he steps into the street and then some demonic baying happens. More saving throws must be rolled and Navarre is pretty chuffed to pass his on an “18”. Not so the chevalier and Sir Eber, who flee the cavern in all haste, back through the grating and up the stream.
When the baying does not stop, Navarre and Sir Oengus, the latter still outside, exchange some glances and draw their weapons. Navarre has advanced only inches when two gi-normous, hound-like shadows come shifting in at unbelievable speed, materializing as they do and each attacking one of the noble duo. The beasts stand at least two foot tall at the shoulder and they must weigh at least a hundred pounds each – mastiffs of the largest and most monstrous kind.
“Bloody hell!,” Navarre exclaims, swinging his sword and managing to roll a “1” – old habits and all that. And what was that about finally passing a saving throw, you idiot? Still outside, Sir Oengus has managed to shoot two arrows into the mastiff zooming in on him, which, unfortunately, even though they do inflict some considerable damage, do nothing to prevent the beast from locking its massive jaws on him and pulling him to the floor. All things considered, this ain’t looking so good for our noble duo and things do not get much better when Navarre misses again – it’s a “2” this time – and is bitten by his opponent as Sir Oengus is mauled some more and also misses his opponent.
But then, Sir Suvali appears and he fires a magic missile at Sir Oengus’ mastiff, causing some serious damage. Sir Oengus is mauled again for massive damage and now, surely, he won’t last much longer, especially since he doesn’t manage to damage his opponent – again. Navarre, who doesn’t seem to be having his day, also misses (On a “5”. Cheer up! It’s progress). Sir Suvali fires another magic missile at Sir Oengus’ mastiff and now the beast sags to the floor. With Sir Oengus scrambling to his feet, Navarre manages to miss his opponent again. Sir Suvali fires another magic missile and so he is the first to inflict some damage on the second mastiff, followed by a serious blow from Sir Oengus.
Fortunate that the beast hasn’t been very effective in its attacks against him yet, Navarre finally manages to hit it, being the only one to do so this round – Sir Oengus misses and Sir Suvali has run out of magic missiles and has started shooting arrows at it, to no effect.
It is around this time that the fleeing nobles regain their senses and Sir Eber starts back to the cavern at speed. The chevalier moves his hat to a jaunty angle and starts after him – which costs him a round, thank you very much. Back at the egg, each of the noble trio manages to damage the last remaining mastiff, with Sir Oengus delivering the killing blow.
“Bloody, bloody hell!,” Navarre breathes heavily, shaking Sir Oengus’ hand after the monster has gone down. “Well done! Well done, old boy! What a fight!”
The noble duo all but sag to the floor in relief and Sir Suvali tends to their wounds. However, there is not much the sorcerer can do to improve Sir Oengus’ condition – he is in a bad state. Our noble heroes are still reeling from the fight when Sir Eber appears.
“Ah!,” Navarre manages to utter in a feeble attempt at some light banter. “Look who’s finally here!”
“Better kill them off,” the ranger says. “They may rise.”
Somewhat bewildered, Navarre and Sir Oengus stick their swords into the mastiffs and now, sure enough, both monsters dissolve into shadows. Navarre witnesses the event in astonishment. What witchcraft is this? Were the creatures even real?
“Gentlemen,” Sir Suvali says. “We must retreat and prepare.”
“Prepare?,” Sir Eber scoffs. “How?”
“Oengus is in a bad state,” the sorcerer says. “I advise against him going on in this condition.”
“Damned nuisance but I agree,” Navarre says. “He bore the brunt of the attack.”

Day 32 to 44: And so it was that our noble heroes made their retreat only a couple of hours into their first foray into the depths of the earth and spent the next twelve days recuperating and preparing for their next outing. They originally planned for some seven days of this but getting the right supplies turned out to take quite a bit longer than expected.
Lists were made and Sir Suvali said that he would try and contact the Coven of Ilm to see if he could get more of the healing salves, ointments, and potions the novice gave them on Captain Clifford’s barge.
“I will need a lot of money,” he said.
“Well?,” Navarre replied. “You’re in charge of the coffers yourself, old sport. So how much is there?”
“Not enough,” the sorcerer said. “Everybody has to chip in.”
“I am sorry to say that I only have some seven hundred and thirty gold coins,” the chevalier said, his face expressing both a reluctance to part with the money and an air that seemed to convey the notion that the sum was barely worth mentioning.
“Well, old fruit,” Navarre said, looking at his noble friend in some amusement. “Then the only question would seem to be whether you are going to hand it to the sorcerer here, what?”
When the chevalier had reluctantly handed over the money, Sir Suvali said that he would be back as soon as he could.
“How are you going to get to the coven anyway?,” Navarre asked him. “I thought nobody knew where they reside?”
“I’ll have to write letters,” Sir Suvali said. “Spoke to the rector earlier. That sort of thing.”
“Quite,” Navarre said, annoyed at the sorcerer’s obvious reluctance to reveal more of the matter. “Best leave it to you then, shall we?”

When he returned some days later, Sir Suvali informed his noble companions that getting the potions would take longer than he thought.
“We’ll be in here for twelve days instead of seven,” he said. “I have ordered seven potions and each is about four hundred gold. So I need more money.”
“Well, I cannot help you there,” Navarre said. “Haven’t seen a copper in yonks.”
“Anyone?,” the sorcerer asked. “Scaralat?”
The chevalier coughed uncomfortably.
“I may still have some… bibelots,” he admitted. “Mere bagatelles, I assure you. Hardly worth the trouble.”
“How much?,” the sorcerer asked.
“A trifle, no more,” the chevalier said, emptying his pockets with a tortured look on his face.
And so it was that the chevalier added another thousand gold to the coffers of the party.
“Good,” Sir Suvali said, after pocketing the trinkets. “That’s nine potions.”
The chevalier threw up his hands in desperation.
“Je suis un clochard!,” he exclaimed.
“Ha, ha!,” Navarre laughed. “Noblesse oblige and all that, old fruit! Welcome to the club!”

Day 44: Sir Suvali returns early in the morning, bringing more supplies: fire bombs, similar projectiles filled with acid, food for two ten-days, some Lillac, the promised potions, and then some. He starts handing out numerous flasks to his noble companions.
“That’s two potions of extra-healing each,” he says. “You can drink them in one go for full effect or in portions of three to top up. And here are doses of Sir Eber’s oil of enchantment for each of us. I have divided it up into portions that will last for a limited amount of time only. Use in emergencies only.”
“Arr!,” Sir Oengus says, back to his full hit points again. “Sails away, lubbers!”

 

[ilgatto]

Duergar & Daemons
Part III: The Egg of Klop​

Day 44, continued: It must be around seven o’clock in the morning when our noble heroes leave the smithy for their third expedition into the Underdark. Sir Suvali has explained to his noble companions that the coven added some extra potions to the deal as a way of thanking them for their efforts in retrieving the Kettle of the Coven. Otherwise, he said, getting any of the potions at all would have been impossible. Well, well done and all that.

With Navarre and Sir Eber taking turns to lead the way – their little game of who walks at the frontest apparently getting more serious by the expedition – our noble heroes reach the cavern with the giant egg around eleven o’clock. They advance to the egg in some trepidation but when there’s no demonic baying and no monstrous shadow dogs phasing in to the attack, they tentatively enter what they now call ‘the city’. They notice that the buildings lining the street are only slightly smaller than those they know from some areas in The Forest and thus likely high enough for humans to stand within. Their architecture is best described as ‛minimalist’ and they all seem to be grouped in sections centered on an empty space in the center, like pieces of a pie (A spider’s web, anyone?). Everything in sight is some shade of gray, running the gamut from almost black to almost white.
“The light comes from the sphere on top of the egg,” Sir Suvali says, looking up. “Its lower half protrudes into the egg on this side.”

“What’s with these murals?,” Sir Oengus asks, looking at the walls of the buildings to the left. “I get all lop-sided looking at them.”
Sure enough, looking at the murals long enough does seem to lead to our noble heroes experiencing dizzy spells and even headaches. When they start inspecting them in stages, they notice that the glyphs seem to relate some sort of story about lithe dwarves in a boat. Sir Eber and Navarre discuss this for a bit and conclude that the story seems to indicate that the lithe dwarves came to the cavern from somewhere and settled in it.
“Out of my way,” Sir Suvali interrupts their musings as he impatiently pushes past the noble duo now that nothing too untoward seems to have happened. “I’ll have a look.”
“By all means, old fruit,” Navarre says, gallantly stepping aside. “Don’t let us break your stride and all that.”

“Allô?,” comes the hesitant voice of the chevalier, getting nothing more than a faint echo.
“Visitors!,” he tries again, a little louder and shining his lantern down the street.
But nothing stirs.

As some of the noble heroes turn their attention to the city again, they stand in wonder of what they see once again. The whole egg has an eerie quality about it – alien, trippy even, with its shades of gray and its mixture of organic and straight lines.
Eventually, the chevalier advances further down the street and notices an alley to his right, between a taller and a lower building, the first built against the wall – the shell of the egg. To his left there is only a single building, divided into two sections with the one against the wall being taller than the one closer to the central – plaza? He passes the alley and notices a lacquered door in the lower building It seems to be made of long, interwoven leaves of some kind – or perhaps shoots of bamboo? He cannot be sure.

While the others are discussing the murals again, the chevalier opens the door and has a look inside. There is a single, windowless room with a kitchen-like area, a workbench, and a metal staircase leading up to an open trapdoor in the ceiling. A few beakers and what looks like an alchemist’s tools and utensils are in various locations in the room. The home of an alchemist? A witch? A sorcerer? The room has obviously not been touched for quite some time. Was it looted and ransacked at some point? Hard to say, since most of what’s still in it is made of stone, carved from rock.
He ponders the matter for a while before he decides to let the matter rest for now and advances to the central ‘plaza’.
“A-ha-ha-ha!,” he laughs his falsetto laugh. “Do you see that? The walls facing the plaza are sturdy and thick, too! Pour des festivités forts on the city plaza, perhaps?”

Navarre, Sir Oengus, and Sir Eber catch up with the chevalier and they, too, are now looking at the open space in front of them, a circular plaza of large granite slabs and measuring some ten yards in diameter. Cut into the granite are two concentric circles, one three yards in diameter and the other four. Both are centered on a circular central section with a strange symbol cut into it. A wheel with eight spokes? No, it is more like a mirrored double swastika – if the gentle reader will forgive the DM’s description – in a circle. Spiders, anyone?
“Bizarre,” Navarre breathes. “What are the circles made of?”
“It’s a ring of iron,” Sir Eber says, on his knees. “A ring of iron with runes stamped into it.”
“It’s a magical language,” Sir Suvali says, who seems to take the discovery as his cue to appear out of nowhere. He starts following the perimeter of the circle and rolling dice, the latter because the DM tells him to.
“Let’s see…,” he says. “There’s six of them in groups of three. Hmm…, hmm…, ah! Gate. Protection. Strength. Permanency. Hmm…, yes. Can’t read the other two.”
“Gate!?,” Navarre asks sharply. “What does it all mean? Is it a prayer? Wasn’t there something like this in the giant’s cabin?”
But, now, the sorcerer has managed to cross both the central symbol and circles – without mentioning this small matter to the DM and keeping a straight face when confronted by him – and he presently reports that the circle closest to the symbol contains powdered silver.

It would be fair to say that our noble heroes have rather a lot to take in. Indeed, the alien, silent city has a dampening effect on their usual panache, filling them with a strange sense of foreboding as it does.
Although perhaps less so in the case of the chevalier, who presently appears on the roof of the ‛sorcerer’s home’ – a roof terrace overlooking the plaza and surrounded by a low wall. A block of stone sits against the wall at the far end, with a torch holder on each corner, each somehow both ornate and minimalist in style at the same time.
“There is an altar up here!,” he calls to his noble fellows down in the plaza. “And another one on the roof across the plaza! Ah! The black arts! Does someone have a chicken? Get things going? Eh.., tiens! C’est quoi ça?”
He has noticed something glistening in mid-air to his right, which turns out to be a small metal chain leading all the way up to the top of the egg. Evidently mustering all of his strength, he manages to not pull it.

Below him, Sir Suvali crosses the plaza again and peeks into the second building with an ‛altar’ on the roof. It turns out to be a temple or shrine of sorts, wholly empty but for a gray stone statue of a large, lithe if not gaunt, dwarf.
Navarre advances to the center of the plaza and has a good look at the carved symbol, trying his damnedest not to think of spider ships and gates to the Abyss. The chevalier appears in the plaza again and starts walking around its perimeter, hollering that there are more murals on the walls of the buildings in the other streets. When Sir Eber and Sir Oengus join him in trying to make sense of them, the trio once more find it hard to focus on them without getting headaches.

Back at the ‘temple’, Sir Suvali has finally mustered up enough courage to enter the building. Within seconds, he comes running out again, screaming at the top of his voice. Navarre, still in the center of the plaza, sees his noble fellow approaching fast.
“What!?,” he yells at him.
“I was attacked by my own shadow!”
“And where is it now?,” Navarre asks, wondering whether the sorcerer has lost his mind but drawing his sword anyway.
“In there!,” Sir Suvali yells, still running and pointing at the building behind him. “Over there! See for yourself!”
Navarre crosses the plaza, closes the door to the building, and starts waking back to the center of the plaza, where most of his noble fellows have now gathered.
“There seems to be something in there, chaps,” he says. “Best not get in there until we know what’s what.”

Moments later – and somewhat to his amazement – he sees Sir Eber helping the sorcerer up to the roof of the ‘temple’.
“And what are you doing?,” he asks the noble duo and the sorcerer in particular.
“There is an altar up there,” Sir Suvali says. He has obviously forgotten that he left the building screaming just moments ago.
Navarre notices Sir Eber glowering at him, shakes his head, and takes several steps back to make sure he will be in a good position for whatever may come next.
“There is a stage up here,” Sir Suvali reports after some time. “For an orchestra.”

“Search the houses!,” the chevalier cries, speeding off to one of the buildings.

Realizing that the situation may have started spiraling out of control even sooner than he thought, Navarre tries to calm things down.
“Perhaps we should do this in some organized fashion?,” he suggests. “Monstrous shadow dogs, aggressive shadows, that sort of thing?”

But the chevalier has already entered another building, this one a shop of some kind, mostly empty, and he presently starts rummaging through the place. It isn’t long before he comes out again and starts handing out some strange ropes, lighter even than silk ropes and made of a strange, silvery white material. Navarre has a good look at his new rope and he has to admit that he quite likes it. It seems exceptionally thin and strong at the same time and he cannot, for the life of him, determine what it is made of. He looks up to ask the chevalier where he found the rope but his noble friend has disappeared again, no doubt off to search another building. He shrugs and has another good look around. How many… people?... would have lived in this city? Eighty, judging by the number of buildings?
“Who lived here?,” he asks Sir Eber, who has joined him.
“I’d say it was dwarves,” the ranger says. “They're on the murals and the buildings don’t look like they were made by men.”
“Agreed,” Navarre says. “Still, the buildings seem too large for dwarves.”
“Do they?,” Sir Eber asks. “Maybe dwarves like spacious rooms?”
“Quite,” Navarre muses. “So this place was built by the gaunt dwarves. And then what? Why did they leave? Who broke into the city? Where are the intruders now?”
“Perhaps the four dead dwarves in the garden out there where the invaders,” Sir Eber suggests.
“Fair enough,” Navarre says. “So do these corpses belong to… what?... yet another ‘kind’ of dwarf? Are there three different kinds of dwarves? Oerknal, the attackers, and the gaunt ones who built this city?”

“Voyez!,” the chevalier cries, charging into the plaza again and dragging along a strange, largish contraption made of leather. “La cavalerie!”
Sir Eber and Navarre approach and inspect the contraption.
“It is a saddle!,” the chevalier cries excitedly.
“Indeed?,” Navarre wonders, looking at the contraption. He can make head nor tail of it, though he has to admit that it may be a saddle of sorts, featuring as it does all manner of leather straps and buckles and what seems to be a high-backed seat. A city laid out along the lines of a spider’s web? A stylized spider in the middle of it? He decides that all this, combined with the contraption, must be enough for him to start thinking of spiders.
“A spider saddle?,” he suggests tentatively.
“Exactement!,” the chevalier says. “Spider cavalry!”
“Hmm…,” Navarre says. “I will admit that I’d rather avoid running into a spider large enough for me to ride.”

What follows is a haphazard series of events, with people appearing at will wherever something seems to be happening or a new discovery is made. The chevalier discovers a pâtisserie and then Sir Suvali has teleported to the roof of the ‛sorcerer’s home’, where he has a good look at the metal chain. It seems to be attached to a metal latch high up in the top of the egg and he cannot help but identify it as some sort of mechanical ‘light switch’, to be used to close the latch and cover the sphere of light embedded in the top of the egg. When Navarre tries to determine whether the city was perhaps once a hub of trade or place of interest to visiting folk, he is told that ‘the place looks like it housed many people a very long time ago’. Fair enough, that may have been a bit of a long shot.

Things calm down a bit – in a manner of speaking – when Sir Suvali calls out from one of the streets.
“A dragon!,” he yells. “They work for a dragon!”
He has found what turns out to be the last of the murals, this one depicting gaunt dwarves riding spiders, gaunt dwarves building the egg, gaunt dwarves arriving in an empty cavern, and, finally, a dragon. In all its weirdness, Navarre is amazed to find that the city can still throw up a serious surprise or two. A dragon? Surely not? He shakes his head, not so much in disbelief as in amazement. What else will this… world throw at him? How surreal will it get? Is it real in any way? Have our noble heroes ventured into a fairy tale world? Is he to accept all of this as reality? Dwarves on giant spiders? A dragon? Preposterous! And yet, all around him, right there, right in front of him, everything seems to point to all of these fantastic notions actually being true.

Some time later, we find Navarre, sword in one hand and lantern in the other, on the threshold of the tall building directly to the right of the doors our noble heroes used to enter the egg some hours ago. It turns out to be a refectory or mess hall of sorts, a single room with a high ceiling and containing stone benches and tables, a stone counter, and some stone doors in the wall behind it, likely a built-in cupboard. Although the building is taller than the one next to it and closer to the plaza, it does not have a second floor.
“Perhaps we should spend the night in here, whenever that may be,” he says to Sir Oengus behind him. “It seems easy to defend. Only one exit, no windows, no trapdoor in the ceiling, high enough for us to stand in.”
He moves further into the room and then, in the light of his lantern and that of Sir Oengus in the doorway, he sees his own shadow come alive, rise up from the floor, transform into the shape of a grotesque dwarf and go for this throat.
“Watch out!,” Sir Oengus yells behind him, involuntarily taking some steps back.
“Chargez!,” the chevalier cries, drawing his sword, storming into the room and swinging it straight through the shadowy thing. “Mon Dieu!”
As the chevalier start running out of the room again, Navarre swings his sword at the shadow – to even less effect than his noble friend before him. The shadow lashes out at him, its claws moving straight through him and chilling him to the bone. Indeed, our noble hero has to gather all of his, now reduced, strength to remain standing. Outside, Sir Eber starts pouring some of the magical weapon oil on his sword, while Sir Suvali launches a magic missile at the creature.
“Get out!,” the sorcerer yells, when the shadowy horror seems to recoil for a second.
Navarre starts moving back to the door at a slow pace, forcing Sir Oengus to make room for him so that he has to forego a straight shot at the shadow.
And then three more of the shadows appear.

“They are cursed!,” Sir Suvali shouts, taking his longbow from his back and getting 50 xp for the remark.
Navarre is almost at the door when Sir Eber comes charging past him and starts hacking away at the shadow, chopping off whole wisps of it.
“The oil works!,” he yells, while the shadow attacks Navarre again, fortunately to no effect.
“Magic arrows work!,” Sir Oengus hollers when one of his dart-tipped arrows makes the shadow lose some more of its substance.

Now, only Sir Eber remains in the room proper, with his noble fellows firing magical arrows and bolts from the doorway. Navarre fires one of his dart-tipped bolts into the first shadow to great effect, causing it to dissipate, and then Sir Eber makes one of his attacks count on another, which also dissipates.
There are now only two shadows left, which start moving back into the room. Sir Eber charges after them and, now, Sir Oengus and Navarre also advance again. Sir Oengus makes two of his arrows count against one of the shadows but takes a chilling hit himself from the other. Sir Suvali, still outside, hits one of the remaining shadows with an arrow and the chevalier, Sir Eber, and Navarre also make their attacks count, with a shot from the latter resulting in yet another shadow dissipating. Sir Oengus shoots an arrow point-blank into the last remaining shadow (“20”), inflicting massive damage but suffering yet another hit. Finally, arrows from Sir Suvali and the chevalier make the last shadow dissipate.
“Chargez!,” the chevalier cries, swinging his sword and charging into the room.
“They’re gone,” Sir Eber informs him, sheathing his sword.

“Does everybody feel as lousy as I do?,” Navarre asks, when everybody is in the room. He feels weak and numb – and cannot shake the feeling for the next hour. He stumbles about for a bit, collects his bolts and checks how the room can be defended for when night falls and millions of shadows will surely emerge. There is only one entrance, no windows, no secret doors, no trapdoors in the ceiling – but his mind is not really into it.

With Navarre and Sir Oengus thus shivering and weakened, Sir Eber and the chevalier have a look behind the counter, where they find a small stash of wood and a stone trunk, from which they retrieve what seem to be a dozen loaves of bread. They somehow conclude – i.e., are told by the DM – that the bread must be around four hundred years old and that it was made from fungi and fish. They also find eight jars of a marmite-like substance – a fish paste?

“Next!,” the chevalier yells, storming out of the refectory, much to Navarre’s exasperation. What is wrong with the fellow? Why does he persist in running in and out of buildings like a headless chicken? Is this excitable fop to lead a unit of cavalry in a war?
The chevalier charges into what turns out to be an alchemist’s atelier or shop of some sort. Several shelves line the walls, from which our intrepid hero collects many pottery jars, some containing one of three kinds of granules (white, yellow, bluish) and others a thick, brownish paste. He takes his finds back to the refectory, where he opens and smells all of them, getting all excited when he finds that the bluish granules smell of lavender.
“Bath salts!,” he exclaims. “Délicieux!”

In the next hour, the chevalier, Sir Eber, and Sir Suvali inspect the rest of the buildings in groups of varying composition, with the first turning out be ‘a home’; then a small brewery, where they find some empty stone flasks with the word “Brow” on them, in Gaelic; and then a bathhouse in the building behind the ‛temple’, complete with basins, taps – the works. The latter gets the chevalier all excited and, when one of the taps starts spitting out a muddy, brown drab-like substance after a lot of gurgling and clunking, he runs back to the refectory to fetch his bath salts and some of the firewood. It doesn’t take long before he is splashing about happily in a hot bath, singing operettas in a falsetto voice. Blissfully unaware of most of this, Navarre is still in the refectory, huddled in his cloak and trying to shake his feeling of weakness.
Around midday Sir Eber and Sir Suvali explore the last building of the city, in which they find some large, glass boxes on shelves.
“Terrariums,” Sir Suvali says.
“A spider farm,” Sir Eber agrees.
“That was it,” Sir Suvali says. “The final building.”

All of this means that our noble heroes have identified the following buildings, in order of discovery: the ‛sorcerer’s home’, the ‛temple’, the building where the chevalier found the ropes, a saddler’s shop, the pâtisserie (a bakery), the ‛refectory’, an alchemist’s atelier or shop, a ‛home’, a small brewery, a bathhouse, and the ‛spider farm’. They have also found a building described as ‛a small kitchen where pasta, marmite, and bouillabaisse seem to have been made’, but it is no longer known when this was. Indeed, as memory serves, there was some confusion as to what was what, where, and when, perhaps because of events unfolding in such a chaotic fashion.

Our noble heroes now also have a general idea of what the murals are about. They seem to relate the story of two of the gaunt dwarves leading perhaps one hundred of their fellows and setting out in a boat, having some adventures, and eventually ending up in a cavern where they built the egg and ran into a dragon which, according to Sir Suvali, they ended up working for. They have also somehow concluded that the corpses in the tumuli are locals, which assigns the theory they were part of some invading force to the bin.

It must be way past midday when Navarre and Sir Oengus feel up to some action again and the chevalier emerges from his bath, humming contently as he enters the refectory smelling of roses – pardon, lavender.
“Don’t you smell delicious,” Sir Eber says, with more than a hint of sarcasm in his voice.
“Why, thank you!,” the chevalier sings.
“Perhaps we should deal with the shadow in the temple before we get too pleased with ourselves?,” Navarre suggests.
“Let’s do it,” Sir Eber says, drawing his weapons. They still glisten with the magical oil.
“On y va!,” the chevalier exclaims, coating his sword with some of the oil.

Our noble heroes move to the ‘temple’ and enter it in an orderly manner for a change, the chevalier and Sir Eber charging in under cover of the others with their dart-tipped missiles in the doorway.
Navarre is the first to hit the shadow when it appears – this one featuring what appear to be shadowy robes and..., um..., horns? Sir Suvali’s arrows miss their target but the chevalier manages to deliver a massive blow. Sir Eber has to dodge a particularly vicious attack and misses the shadow and then Sir Oengus hits it twice, causing it to dissipate.
“See that an orderly assault works much better than charging headlong into things at random?,” Navarre snaps at the chevalier next to him.
“I never said it wouldn’t,” the latter returns stiffly.
“Touché, mon cher!,” Navarre says, smiling despite himself.

A closer inspection of the ‘temple’ reveals a space that was broken open some time ago and seems to have been a hidden safe. On the floor in front of it is a collection of musical instruments – cymbals, a small drum, a trumpet, a flute, a violin.
“They rather seem to be a musical lot, these dwarves,” Navarre remarks.
“Maybe we could organize une petite soirée?,” the chevalier smiles, pocketing most of the instruments.
Now, Sir Suvali retrieves two jars containing some sort of milky white jelly from the safe.
“Spider eggs?,” Navarre suggests, nudging the chevalier.

When our noble heroes have returned to the refectory, the chevalier attempts to put a monetary value to the things they found so far. He estimates the wispy ropes to be worth, perhaps, one hundred gold and he also identifies the granules: the white ones turn to be table salt, the yellow ones smelling salt, and the blue ones, sure enough, bath salt.
“In which case methinks I’ll have a bath, too,” Sir Oengus says, much to the delight of the chevalier.

Epilogue: When the session ends, the DM informs our noble heroes that the white jelly from the safe in the ‘temple’ is actually fish eggs and that the brown paste they found with the salts is best described as an extremely potent sunscreen (factor 50), which functions for seven days and has some heat-resisting qualities.