Dr Midnight
Explorer
“Hold… what’s that?” Ziad was looking ahead. He pointed. They were maybe six hundred feet high now, and just ahead, dozens of seagull feathers and a few gull skeletons littered the ground outside a cave.
With no hesitation at all, Vek volunteered to investigate the cave. He strode in with no worries at all.
In the darkness, his keen undead eyes needed no light. He saw a large hunched form raise one thin scaled neck with a dragonlike head at its end. Then, another raised beside it. Then another. Then another. Then the other five. It attacked.
Vek parried its attacks and Dartan jumped in to fight beside him. Jamison hovered over the perilous drop and angled himself to look inside. He had little room to attack from here, but he could identify the monster. He remembered something about it from Gorgoldand’s books, long ago. “It’s called a hydra! Something about cutting off heads…”
“Sounds good,” Dartan said, and he swept his sword through a neck with the sound of an orange being quickly sliced open. Immediately, the wound seemed to cauterize, and then two buds began sprouting from the neck. They began to turn into new heads.
“Oh, bother this,” Vek murmured in his amused voice. He stepped forward and placed his hand to the hydra’s body and said a word. Each of the hydra’s twenty eyes went wide with shock, then whitened and shriveled like raisins. The ten heads fell to the ground, because the hydra was dead.
“That’s handy.” Dartan sheathed his sword. “Takes some of the fun out of things, doesn’t it?”
Jamison came in. “I can sense some magic in this room. Can we move this thing?” The hydra completely filled the cavern.
Kizzlorn shrunk the hydra’s body to the size of one of the seagulls it had been so fond of eating, and threw it back over her shoulder. It plummeted towards the sea, with a dozen squawking gulls diving after it for food. They fetched the treasure they found in its cave and moved onwards.
A small temple of white marble sat at the top of the stone-cut steps. Four white pillars flanked the front surface. The interior was cloaked in shadows, but a flickering light emanated from deep within. They readied their weapons and walked inside. There, they found the temple interior lit by four burning braziers in the corners. At the far end of the room stood a damaged, white marble statue of a beautiful woman wearing flowing robes. The woman's face had been broken off, leaving only blank space from chin to brow. At 18 feet tall, the statue's head nearly touched the 20-foot-tall ceiling.
On the floor before her lay 64 squares of colored tile, forming an 8-by-8 chessboard. Several stone chess pieces were in position, as if in the middle of an interrupted game. Carved into the floor before the chessboard were the words, "SUBMIT TO THE FORCE OF DARKNESS."
“What do you make of that?” Ziad studied the puzzle’s layout.
Dartan loosened his sword in his sheath. “Whatever it is, that statue is attacking us. That’s always the way of it.”
“So… are we to assume that it’s our ‘turn’, and we have to… uh…”
Jamison had an idea. He ran to the braziers and began turning them over, extinguishing their light. When that was done, they all stood in darkness and Jamison muttered “Okay, it was worth a shot,” and turned the braziers back upright.
“What if we just tip the white king over… as if to surrender, or submit, to the black side?” He tipped the white king over and a click was heard beneath the stone. The row of tiles closest to the statue lowered 1½ feet; the next, 3 feet; the third, 4½ feet, and so on, until a "stairway" formed, allowing entry into the lower levels of the temple.
Everyone was impressed with the dwarf’s ability. Orthos didn’t take time to savor the adulation... he lit a torch and said “Let’s go!”
They walked down into the temple. This 20 ft. by 30 ft. room had an open doorway in the opposite wall and two niches on either side of the hall. Situated in each niche was a marble statue of an athletic female archer with a drawn bow, standing upon a two foot tall platform. Each figure wore a simple toga and shin guards, and, like the statue of the woman in the temple above, had had its face chipped off. Engraved on the floor was the following:
THERE'S DANGER AHEAD, BUT YOU ARE IN LUCK
A CLUE TO SURVIVAL YOU WILL RECEIVE
I MAY NOT BE CLEAR, BUT I NEVER DECEIVE
YOUR CLUE IS TO GET WHAT YOU GET FROM A DUCK.
The party exchanged glances and ducked under the archers’ lines of fire. “Are they all going to be that easy,” asked Ziad.
“Nan-ny!” The huge shield guardian couldn’t duck that low, so he simply walked through the trap. Greenish bolts blasted into him and ate away a bit at his hull. Nanny turned and punched one of the statues in the face, and its head exploded into flying pieces of marble. Satisfied, Nanny walked on.
The next room was slightly more puzzling. This room had a faint fragrance of oranges. As such, it was perhaps not surprising that the floor contained a tile mosaic forming an orange tree in full bloom, or that the words "WEAK ORANGE PEELS" appeared over the three doorways to the north. The doorways on either end seemed to veer off to side corridors, while the middle doorway led to a set of stairs going down.
“Weak orange peels? What the…” Jamison knelt and studied the mosaic.
“Perhaps we have to depress the orange tiles… they’re made to drop into the floor.” Orthos’ keen dwarven eyes saw that the oranges moved downwards… to what end, though, he couldn’t guess. He looked at the others, shrugged, and pushed a tile into the floor. Fine orange dust sprinkled down upon them from tiny holes in the ceiling. “Hold your breath!”
They did, but some of them were affected by the powder. Kizzlorn, Jamison and Ziad felt noticeably weaker and sicklier. Orthos healed them with his god-given powers. Kizzlorn looked up and said “Hey… ‘peels’ is ‘sleep’ spelled backwards.” They looked up and saw she was right, but they couldn’t make sense of “weak” or “orange”.
They walked through the center doorway and down the stairs there. This oddly shaped room was a shambles: broken and rotting bits of wooden tables and benches made it likely that it once served as a dining hall, but it would be difficult to imagine it being put to any such use now. Clumps of mold here and there might have once been bits of food, and could account for the stench of decay prevalent in the room.
Suddenly, from behind an overturned piece of table, four blackish-brown, oily masses begin to slither towards them. These were defeated with no real trouble, and the group mourned that there was no treasure to be found… just more doors.
They went back up the stairs and took the passage to the northeast. Here, the corridor bent toward the north, and up ahead there were several letters carved onto the floor tiles, which were arranged in a 4-by-9 gridwork that extended from wall to wall. Over the gridwork were passing eight immense sawblades. They clouded the air so quickly that the other side of the hallway could scarcely be seen. The following was carved into the floor, immediately before the gridwork began: “THE CAPTURE OF YOUR ENEMY IS WELL WITHIN SIGHT OR MAKING SURE THAT YOUR SPOUSE IS ALL RIGHT"
The gridwork was arranged as follows:
SEKY
LITC
TANI
NMLG
CEKS
RNPC
IAEO
WLHR
NTAC
“Checkmate,” Orthos said.
Ziad rubbed his forehead. “I suppose, but what do you…”
“No, look.” The dwarf pointed at the floor: C. He pointed to the next letter up and to the left: H. Onwards, there was a path spelling CHECKMATE in the tiles.
Again, the group was impressed with his skills. “Orthie, who knew you were such a cerebral puzzlehound?” Kizz had been adventuring with the dwarf for a year, and hadn’t seen this side of him.
“We don’t do much traveling in dungeons that allow you the luxury of figuring out a brainteaser, Kizz, love. I wish they were all like this.” He stepped on the C tile and the blade barring his way to the next tile locked into the wall. In this way they walked all the way across.
This large, octagonal room had eight openings, one on each side. The north, south, northeast, and northwest doorways led to different rooms or corridors, while the others each opened into a small niche holding a bench beneath a beautiful painting, presumably so someone can sit and gaze upon the statue prominently displayed in the center of the room.
The statue stood 8 feet tall upon a raised platform twelve inches high. The carving was quite intricate, showing a warrior woman with a metal spear held high, stabbing down at a winged demon lying at her feet. The demon wore an expression of pain. Like the other statues they’d seen so far, the woman's face has been chipped away. Like all the other statues they’d seen so far, Dartan expected it to come to life at any moment and attack.
Carved above the three northern doorways, two words to each, was the legend "ORCS DID HARM YON STATUE THERE."
“Huh. Another word puzzle.” Kizz looked up at the words, thinking hard.
None of them saw Jamison reaching up to the statue’s hand and removing the spear from it. “Look, the spear isn’t attached to the statue. I think it’s magica-“
SHUNK!
The paintings above the benches shot up into the wall to reveal two “windows”, covered with three iron bars each, and beyond these was the head of a trapped beast. Each looked very much like a bull- except it had metallic scales covering its entire body. The bulls exhaled a thick greenish cloud of gas into the room.
Ziad yelled just before the gas reached them. “Cover your mouth!”
The gas cleared, and they were all still standing. Jamison and Vek gave the creatures no time to blast them again- they were dead in moments. “Well, that was exciting. Say, what’s this?” Vek had found a glyph in the room to the northeast. He studied it from several feet back. “This is a Symbol of Discord. It would drive us all to fight. Everyone, stand back in the hall until I say it’s safe to come back.”
They did as he asked, and Vek walked over the symbol. It made a static noise and an arc of greenish light bent through the room. It passed through his head and found no mind to work its magic on. Vek stood there patiently until he was certain its effects were gone. He called the others in.
As they walked, Kizzlorn looked above the door to the room he was in and made sense of the two words there. “Hey… ORCS DID. Rearrange the letters, and they spell DISCORD.”
Orthos looked. “Well I’ll be,” he said. “And look! Over the center door: HARM YON. That could be HARMONY…”
“Which would be the opposite of DISCORD,” Vek noted.
“But what does STATUE THERE translate to?” They stood for some time, working over the many possibilities. After a while, they just decided to enter that corridor to see for themselves.
More to come…
Most room descriptive text by module author Johnathan Richards
With no hesitation at all, Vek volunteered to investigate the cave. He strode in with no worries at all.
In the darkness, his keen undead eyes needed no light. He saw a large hunched form raise one thin scaled neck with a dragonlike head at its end. Then, another raised beside it. Then another. Then another. Then the other five. It attacked.
Vek parried its attacks and Dartan jumped in to fight beside him. Jamison hovered over the perilous drop and angled himself to look inside. He had little room to attack from here, but he could identify the monster. He remembered something about it from Gorgoldand’s books, long ago. “It’s called a hydra! Something about cutting off heads…”
“Sounds good,” Dartan said, and he swept his sword through a neck with the sound of an orange being quickly sliced open. Immediately, the wound seemed to cauterize, and then two buds began sprouting from the neck. They began to turn into new heads.
“Oh, bother this,” Vek murmured in his amused voice. He stepped forward and placed his hand to the hydra’s body and said a word. Each of the hydra’s twenty eyes went wide with shock, then whitened and shriveled like raisins. The ten heads fell to the ground, because the hydra was dead.
“That’s handy.” Dartan sheathed his sword. “Takes some of the fun out of things, doesn’t it?”
Jamison came in. “I can sense some magic in this room. Can we move this thing?” The hydra completely filled the cavern.
Kizzlorn shrunk the hydra’s body to the size of one of the seagulls it had been so fond of eating, and threw it back over her shoulder. It plummeted towards the sea, with a dozen squawking gulls diving after it for food. They fetched the treasure they found in its cave and moved onwards.
A small temple of white marble sat at the top of the stone-cut steps. Four white pillars flanked the front surface. The interior was cloaked in shadows, but a flickering light emanated from deep within. They readied their weapons and walked inside. There, they found the temple interior lit by four burning braziers in the corners. At the far end of the room stood a damaged, white marble statue of a beautiful woman wearing flowing robes. The woman's face had been broken off, leaving only blank space from chin to brow. At 18 feet tall, the statue's head nearly touched the 20-foot-tall ceiling.
On the floor before her lay 64 squares of colored tile, forming an 8-by-8 chessboard. Several stone chess pieces were in position, as if in the middle of an interrupted game. Carved into the floor before the chessboard were the words, "SUBMIT TO THE FORCE OF DARKNESS."
“What do you make of that?” Ziad studied the puzzle’s layout.
Dartan loosened his sword in his sheath. “Whatever it is, that statue is attacking us. That’s always the way of it.”
“So… are we to assume that it’s our ‘turn’, and we have to… uh…”
Jamison had an idea. He ran to the braziers and began turning them over, extinguishing their light. When that was done, they all stood in darkness and Jamison muttered “Okay, it was worth a shot,” and turned the braziers back upright.
“What if we just tip the white king over… as if to surrender, or submit, to the black side?” He tipped the white king over and a click was heard beneath the stone. The row of tiles closest to the statue lowered 1½ feet; the next, 3 feet; the third, 4½ feet, and so on, until a "stairway" formed, allowing entry into the lower levels of the temple.
Everyone was impressed with the dwarf’s ability. Orthos didn’t take time to savor the adulation... he lit a torch and said “Let’s go!”
They walked down into the temple. This 20 ft. by 30 ft. room had an open doorway in the opposite wall and two niches on either side of the hall. Situated in each niche was a marble statue of an athletic female archer with a drawn bow, standing upon a two foot tall platform. Each figure wore a simple toga and shin guards, and, like the statue of the woman in the temple above, had had its face chipped off. Engraved on the floor was the following:
THERE'S DANGER AHEAD, BUT YOU ARE IN LUCK
A CLUE TO SURVIVAL YOU WILL RECEIVE
I MAY NOT BE CLEAR, BUT I NEVER DECEIVE
YOUR CLUE IS TO GET WHAT YOU GET FROM A DUCK.
The party exchanged glances and ducked under the archers’ lines of fire. “Are they all going to be that easy,” asked Ziad.
“Nan-ny!” The huge shield guardian couldn’t duck that low, so he simply walked through the trap. Greenish bolts blasted into him and ate away a bit at his hull. Nanny turned and punched one of the statues in the face, and its head exploded into flying pieces of marble. Satisfied, Nanny walked on.
The next room was slightly more puzzling. This room had a faint fragrance of oranges. As such, it was perhaps not surprising that the floor contained a tile mosaic forming an orange tree in full bloom, or that the words "WEAK ORANGE PEELS" appeared over the three doorways to the north. The doorways on either end seemed to veer off to side corridors, while the middle doorway led to a set of stairs going down.
“Weak orange peels? What the…” Jamison knelt and studied the mosaic.
“Perhaps we have to depress the orange tiles… they’re made to drop into the floor.” Orthos’ keen dwarven eyes saw that the oranges moved downwards… to what end, though, he couldn’t guess. He looked at the others, shrugged, and pushed a tile into the floor. Fine orange dust sprinkled down upon them from tiny holes in the ceiling. “Hold your breath!”
They did, but some of them were affected by the powder. Kizzlorn, Jamison and Ziad felt noticeably weaker and sicklier. Orthos healed them with his god-given powers. Kizzlorn looked up and said “Hey… ‘peels’ is ‘sleep’ spelled backwards.” They looked up and saw she was right, but they couldn’t make sense of “weak” or “orange”.
They walked through the center doorway and down the stairs there. This oddly shaped room was a shambles: broken and rotting bits of wooden tables and benches made it likely that it once served as a dining hall, but it would be difficult to imagine it being put to any such use now. Clumps of mold here and there might have once been bits of food, and could account for the stench of decay prevalent in the room.
Suddenly, from behind an overturned piece of table, four blackish-brown, oily masses begin to slither towards them. These were defeated with no real trouble, and the group mourned that there was no treasure to be found… just more doors.
They went back up the stairs and took the passage to the northeast. Here, the corridor bent toward the north, and up ahead there were several letters carved onto the floor tiles, which were arranged in a 4-by-9 gridwork that extended from wall to wall. Over the gridwork were passing eight immense sawblades. They clouded the air so quickly that the other side of the hallway could scarcely be seen. The following was carved into the floor, immediately before the gridwork began: “THE CAPTURE OF YOUR ENEMY IS WELL WITHIN SIGHT OR MAKING SURE THAT YOUR SPOUSE IS ALL RIGHT"
The gridwork was arranged as follows:
SEKY
LITC
TANI
NMLG
CEKS
RNPC
IAEO
WLHR
NTAC
“Checkmate,” Orthos said.
Ziad rubbed his forehead. “I suppose, but what do you…”
“No, look.” The dwarf pointed at the floor: C. He pointed to the next letter up and to the left: H. Onwards, there was a path spelling CHECKMATE in the tiles.
Again, the group was impressed with his skills. “Orthie, who knew you were such a cerebral puzzlehound?” Kizz had been adventuring with the dwarf for a year, and hadn’t seen this side of him.
“We don’t do much traveling in dungeons that allow you the luxury of figuring out a brainteaser, Kizz, love. I wish they were all like this.” He stepped on the C tile and the blade barring his way to the next tile locked into the wall. In this way they walked all the way across.
This large, octagonal room had eight openings, one on each side. The north, south, northeast, and northwest doorways led to different rooms or corridors, while the others each opened into a small niche holding a bench beneath a beautiful painting, presumably so someone can sit and gaze upon the statue prominently displayed in the center of the room.
The statue stood 8 feet tall upon a raised platform twelve inches high. The carving was quite intricate, showing a warrior woman with a metal spear held high, stabbing down at a winged demon lying at her feet. The demon wore an expression of pain. Like the other statues they’d seen so far, the woman's face has been chipped away. Like all the other statues they’d seen so far, Dartan expected it to come to life at any moment and attack.
Carved above the three northern doorways, two words to each, was the legend "ORCS DID HARM YON STATUE THERE."
“Huh. Another word puzzle.” Kizz looked up at the words, thinking hard.
None of them saw Jamison reaching up to the statue’s hand and removing the spear from it. “Look, the spear isn’t attached to the statue. I think it’s magica-“
SHUNK!
The paintings above the benches shot up into the wall to reveal two “windows”, covered with three iron bars each, and beyond these was the head of a trapped beast. Each looked very much like a bull- except it had metallic scales covering its entire body. The bulls exhaled a thick greenish cloud of gas into the room.
Ziad yelled just before the gas reached them. “Cover your mouth!”
The gas cleared, and they were all still standing. Jamison and Vek gave the creatures no time to blast them again- they were dead in moments. “Well, that was exciting. Say, what’s this?” Vek had found a glyph in the room to the northeast. He studied it from several feet back. “This is a Symbol of Discord. It would drive us all to fight. Everyone, stand back in the hall until I say it’s safe to come back.”
They did as he asked, and Vek walked over the symbol. It made a static noise and an arc of greenish light bent through the room. It passed through his head and found no mind to work its magic on. Vek stood there patiently until he was certain its effects were gone. He called the others in.
As they walked, Kizzlorn looked above the door to the room he was in and made sense of the two words there. “Hey… ORCS DID. Rearrange the letters, and they spell DISCORD.”
Orthos looked. “Well I’ll be,” he said. “And look! Over the center door: HARM YON. That could be HARMONY…”
“Which would be the opposite of DISCORD,” Vek noted.
“But what does STATUE THERE translate to?” They stood for some time, working over the many possibilities. After a while, they just decided to enter that corridor to see for themselves.
More to come…
Most room descriptive text by module author Johnathan Richards
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