NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 2191723" data-attributes="member: 1210">Into the Dungeons of Fort Kintax8/6/369 O.L.G., 11 a.m., Fort KintaxDerknan, leader of the dwarves now in control of Fort Kintax, offers our heroes 400 gp each to remove the stinking corpses in the dungeons below the fort.  Since our heroes want to see if there are any surviving political prisoners, they agree readily enough to the task.  But when they open the doors to the dungeon they are greeted with such a ripe stench of decay that their stomachs pucker.  Wrapping cloth over their faces, our heroes enter and find a rat-infested, horrible place.  Our heroes descend the stairs, a narrow set of rickety steps that drops almost 100’ before ending in a chamber.  The room holds a desk, which turns out to have been the overseer’s.  He is long gone, but his desk is full of papers detailing the prisoners (most held for insurrection-related crimes; most were elves and dwarves; there was even a powerful elven druid held prisoner).  A search of the desk turns up a key buried in all the papers.  Fortunately, this key opens the door to the cell block.  The stench is horrifying, and thousands of fat, filthy rats with no fear of halflings at all glare at them and them move forward in a huge swarm.  Worse yet, as the combat breaks out, a voice cries out from within one of the cells.  “Please!  Help me!”Just as our heroes fend off the rats, dispersing the last of the swarms, something else emerges from one of the cells.  It looks horrific- skeletal, subtly inhuman in nature, with great shackles floating in the air around it.  It laughs harshly at Hortense’s startled face when her attempt to turn it fails.  Beau’s disrupt undead is ineffective as well.  Then the creature claws Zeke, and one of its shackles latches on to him!Jawbreaker roars.  “FOR DOGTOOTH!!” he cries, and lands an incredible blow to the monster’s sternum, shattering it and killing the thing.*  Carefully our heroes extract Ezeekiel’s arm from the shackle.  “I am not cool with that!” the freedom fighter says.  “He was trying to oppress me!”Now that the immediate danger is over, our heroes move to the cell with the voice in it.  They peer inside and see a dirty little dwarven woman.  “Please, let me out!” she begs.”How are you still alive down here?” exclaims Federico.  “I kept some of the food they gave me aside in case they ever stopped giving me food,” she replies.  “But still, I’m starving!  Oh please, won’t you let me free?  Something terrible has happened- everyone else is dead!”“Why were you in there?””They- the soldiers imprisoned me.”  She sounds somewhat offended.  “I don’t even know exactly why- just that I don’t agree with Bleak.”“We’ll free you,” Ezeekiel calls out.In moments they have done so, and she hurries away towards the dwarves above.  ***8/9/369 O.L.G., 1 p.m.After hauling the corpses from the cell block out of the dungeon and away from the fort, our heroes proceed back down into the stinking dungeon.  They have not fully explored it, but they have seen no other signs of living prisoners.  In fact, the next chamber they investigate is a grisly scene.  Obviously a torture chamber, the room was doubtless host to unspeakable torments inflicted upon the innocent and guilty alike.  Several items of various degrees of inhumanity are in here, including a rack, pincers, a brazier of coals (presently cold), several tables, a wheel, shackles and a variety of cutting instruments.  A number of corpses in here attest to the cruelty of the Strogassians, including a gruesomely rotten corpse on one of the tables that has been almost completely flayed.  It appears as though all of the victims had been tortured, but several were still alive and were simply left to starve when the Strogassians left.  A tray in a corner of the room has a golden tooth, a ring, and a jeweled pin upon it.Beau moves to pick up the tooth, ring and pin even as Hortense starts closing the staring eyes of the corpses.  And suddenly, gruesomely, the skin from the flayed may, which is laid out on a table nearby, flutters to life!  Our heroes cry out in dismay, and then gasp in horror as the spilled blood in the gutters beneath some of the instruments swirls up into a cloud of blood motes!  Worse yet, a ghostly, spectral figure seems to sprout from the corpse, leaping up and fairly crackling wth negative energy; and the very shadow of the body wrenches free and moves to attack as well.Next Time: Trouble in the torture chamber!*This was a crit.  That’s right; this particular monster’s not undead. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  (It was a shackledeath from the CC2.)</blockquote>

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