The Age of Worms - Morrus' Campaign - Finished 6th August!!

[Eccles]

The next morning, we trudged through the mud up the hill into the stockaded mine. The area around the mouth of the mine was ringed with a picket fence, patrolled by men and dwarves to ensure that the mine workers couldn’t leave their ‘employment’. Within the stockade, there were remarkably few buildings; accommodation for the guards and a large cookhouse. One of the guards grunted that the miners lived within the mine, as he led us in there.

The top of the mine assaulted our nostrils with the stench of sweaty bodies and smoky torches. We were shown to a set of stinking flea-infested pallets, but weren’t given time to leave any items behind. This was good, as we didn’t really have a lot with us. Knowing we were going to be searched, Flynn had sneaked into the compound the night before to hide our vital equipment.

We took rusty picks from a decaying rack, and headed into the dimly lit mine. As some sort of idiotic cost-cutting exercise, Dourstone had only paid for half as many torches as were needed to light the mine, resulting in a dim and guttering half-light, in which we trudged past the broken spirited mineworkers, overseen by a massive half-orc with a huge spiked club at his belt.

The foreman set us a target of 2 pounds of silver before our shift was out, and then left us to it without any further advice. We slammed picks into the walls for what seemed like an age before I moved towards another miner and began to ask him about anything unusual in the mine; anywhere the miners weren’t allowed to go.

“There’s nowhere like that,” said the one closest to me. “We don’t exactly have the freedom of the place, you know. Mind you, there is the boarded off passageway down there. Only the manager is allowed down that one.”

Bingo.

 

[Eccles]

Flynn and I set to work immediately; he backed into the shadows to take a look at the mysterious ‘boarded off passage’, whilst I started carrying sacks of rubble out of the mine and returning with small amounts of our equipment. On my third trip, I heard Morgan explaining patiently to the massive half-orc that there was a better source of ore down towards the passageway and making his own way towards the planking.

A couple more trips and I was stopped in turn by one of the guards, demanding to know what was in the sacks. A mumbled excuse and a careful and flamboyant gesture; the man was easily pleased by my turning the sack upside down and shaking it, not even questioning what I was gripping so hard at the bottom of the sack.

As Flynn was hiding our kit within the mine, and I was ferrying it in, it fell to Torvig and Niccoli to distract the manager when he came in a while later. Niccoli’s efforts to get in the mans way resulted in a clout to the head and a series of vile oaths.

Torvig leapt in to stop the violence, and to ask about the manager’s practiced throwing arm. Somehow, the two fell into a discussion about competitive stone throwing, and the manager wandered away to set up a competition with the miners.

.oOo.

We were ready. Just as the other miners were being summoned for their noon-time meal, Morgan directed us in levering the heavy planks off the blockage and pulling them back into place behind us. Beyond, a 400 foot long passageway wound off before us.

After a good deal of trudging through the dark, we reached a small chamber with a wooden platform in the centre, suspended from a metal chain which was securely attached to the ceiling. In the middle of the platform (which was just big enough for three to travel on) was a winch arrangement to hoist the platform down a tunnel beneath us.

Flynn and I stayed at the top, whilst the others winched themselves deeper and deeper into the darkness, the squeaking of the winch and the light form their torch growing fainter and fainter as my friends slowly winched themselves out of sight. Just as he descended from view, I could see Morgan chanting and gasping in the spiritual energies of his protective spells.

 

[Eccles]

A few minutes later, Flynn and I dimly heard the sound of a skirmish from below. Banging on doors, the clang of weapons on armour, and then screaming.

You can imagine our relief some two minutes later when Torvig laboriously winched the platform back up the chain to collect Flynn and I, and the three of us descended together to join Niccoli and Morgan.

At the bottom of the shaft was a crossroads. The passageways to the north, east and west ended in large doors. To the north, the door was fronted with the hand and eye of Vecna. To the west, the door was clear and unmarked. The last door, to the east, was marked with the fist and arrows symbol of Hextor, and just in front of that door lay the decapitated bodies of two armoured tieflings.

To the south was a vast domed hall, carved extremely well and floored with exquisite marble. Torches glowed from the walls and a large square pool stood in the centre of the room filled to the brim with a dark liquid. Spaced above the rim of the pool were three platforms, positioned as though one could step off them and fall into the liquid beneath.

Around the edges of the pool lay bloodstains and scratches in the marble floor.

We backed carefully away from the pool and headed back to the doors.

.oOo.

One of the bodies on the floor had a key at its belt. Flynn took this, and inspected the three doorways. The key fit the door marked with Hextor’s symbol, and we opened it carefully.

Beyond the door was a rectangular room some 40 feet in length, in which stood 8 corpses in rusting plate armour. Tied to each of the corpses was a leather strap with a bell hanging off it. All of us leapt to the same nasty conclusion – stepping into the room would make the corpses move, which would ring the bells and potentially alert something far more unpleasant.

Using Torvig’s longspear and Morgan’s spell to lift small objects at a distance, we severed the bells off two of the bodies. We couldn’t reach any more bells until Niccoli tied the longspear to another spear carried by Flynn. That dealt with most of the bells, but two lay out of reach until we tied a motley assortment of long items, greataxes and anything else we could find to stretch into the room and cut the last of the bells free of the leather straps to float back to Morgan’s outstretched hand.

After congratulating Niccoli for not missing a single bell with our heath-robinson cutting device, we took it apart, gathered a short distance from the door to the room, and Torvig raised his holy symbol to the skeletons.

Almost all of them shuddered, and collapsed noiselessly. The other two moved towards us and were hacked down in moments. We gripped our weapons and prepared to move into the next chamber.

 

[Dpulse303]

With baited breath our readers eagerly await the next installment....coming soon:
"An eye in the hand is worth three in the bush" and "Six arms make for light work(of us)"

seriously though next installment is this evening and i cant wait...bring it on!

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

"An eye in the hand is worth three in the bush" and "Six arms make for light work(of us)

That's a good couple of taglines there Use them for the film version of the story hour?


Great stuff again Mr Eccles!

 

[Tamlyn]

Great stuff again Mr Eccles!

Agreed. Well done!

 

[Darmanicus]

Please remind me not to use up virtually all my spells on 2 mooks

Oh well, back to the trusted X-Bow.

 

[hbarsquared]

Excellent. Your story hour has me laughing out loud with Morgan's "test" and the (mis)adventures while preparing to go through the boarded-up door.

 

[Morrus]

Tonight's session was a blast! Pretty much all combat. I look forward to Eccles' writeup of it!

 

[kroh]

The Test for Morgan was great and I was actually fighting the urge to look ahead to see if your tricks with tying the spears would work.

Nicely Done....

Regards.
Walt