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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ilgatto" data-source="post: 9673928" data-attributes="member: 86051">Duergar & Daemons Part II: Descent Into the Depths of the WorldIn 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 outAt 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 <s>with filters in them</s>? 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.</blockquote>

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