Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="BoldItalic" data-source="post: 6775821" data-attributes="member: 6777052">Next morning they all awoke refreshed and, if they had any interesting dreams, they didn't talk about them. After a simple breakfast of bread, cheese and pickles, they gathered up their few belongings and made for the stairway that lay a short distance to the south.The stairs climbed steadily upwards for a while, until rounding a turn they came to a place where some heavy logs had been piled up, one above the other, to form a barrier. It was quite solidly constructed and obviously intended to keep people - or perhaps monsters - out.Fingers climbed nimbly up the front of the wooden construction to see what lay beyond. "There is a flat area with some sort of door to the right," he reported, "Then there is another barrier on the far side, like this one, and the staircase continues beyond it.""Interesting," remarked Rylnethaz. "Whoever dwells beyond the doorway obviously does not welcome visitors from the staircase.""Yet it is not a very effective barrier, is it?" suggested BoldItalic, "We can easily scale it and any wild beast of sufficient size to pose a threat could probably just leap over it at a bound.""Well, I think we should investigate," decided Rylnethaz.With Fingers' help, they all climbed over the barrier and assembled before the door. Fingers ran his hands over it and pronounced it safe and unremarkable. He pushed it open. A long corridor lay before them, with a vaulted roof about eight feet above the floor and walls lined with good quality masonry. Rather surprisingly, the air smelt faintly of orange blossom. It was dark in the corridor but BoldItalic mumbled a few words under his breath and his staff gave off a convenient yellow glow to light the way.The corridor led through an archway into a circular stone chamber with narrow slit windows spaced around the walls, through which daylight was streaming. There were odd boxes and crates scattered about and some barrels that might have held beer. This was apparently a storeroom of some kind. The only exit seemed to be a wooden trapdoor in the ceiling. Climbing on BoldItalic's shoulders, Fingers reached up and carefully pushed it open."I think we are in a castle," he said. "at the bottom of some sort of tower. There's a door out to what might be a courtyard and a spiral staircase going up to an upper floor. Nobody in here, but I can hear voices nearby and there's a strange knocking sound from somewhere above us. A sort of hollow tapping, like a hammer on stone. Tap, tap, tap."[ TAP! TAP! TAP! shouted the audience ]"Hop down, then, Fingers," said BoldItalic, "and, Clotbert, help me pull some of those crates over here. We can climb on them, to get up through the trapdoor."There was indeed a cobbled courtyard outside the tower. On the far side they could see a rather grand carriage with two horses in harness and several liveried coachmen waiting nearby. There was a coat of arms painted on the side of the carriage but Rylnethaz did not recognize it and the inscription underneath was in an elvish script so archaic that he could not read it.But they kept inside the tower and went cautiously up the stairs and there they found a group of gnomes in workman's overalls. One was urgently hammering a metal rod into the stonework, which explained the tapping noise, and three others were urgently watching him. A fifth gnome, in a smart pin-stripe suit, seemed to be consulting various scrolls and occasionally holding aloft a magic wand of some obscure kind. BoldItalic was quite intrigued.</blockquote>

Verification