TPK, technically.
Dramatis personae:
- Gour-Gash, a goliath barbarian. Dislikes narrow passages.
- Licmorn, an eladrin sorcerer. Depetrified after a thousand years and kind of insane for it.
- Rotti, a tiefling cleric. Likes to bad-mouth people to their face.
- Yanzar, a dark elf druid. Very sneaky, except he loves loud, thunderous spells.
Followers:
- Toxin, an owlin alchemist. Once a familiar who became an apprentice, then an adventurer when his master has met an untimely end.
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| By Vladimir Petkovic |
After escaping from Balalán, Rotti went to the Trollish Mountains - scattered in the mountain valleys are so many tiny villages that nobody can search them all. If a person wants to disappear, this is one of the better ways. For perhaps a week or more, she continued deeper and deeper into the mountains, until one day she arrived to the Halfway Hamlet.
"Good afternoon, sir, I was wondering whether you have any free rooms? And a lunch?" she asks the innkeeper smoking his pipe on a bench in the shade of a large oak.
"Of course, miss! Come in, come in! I've got a delicious mutton goulash on the stove right now, you'll surely enjoy it, and a tankard of beer too, right? That'll come in handy after a long journey. Or two perhaps? To cheer you up a little, too, eh? Hey, Kača, get some goulash and two beers here for the lady! And you can sit here, my dear, please, and I'll be right back." The innkeeper never stops talking as he leads her inside.
The inn is rather deserted right now, cramped and a little smoky, but as clean as possible. An elderly, white-haired man is sitting at a table near one of the windows, drawing and writing something in a book. On the table in front of him is a tankard of beer and a golden statuette of a humanoid with a snake's head. As the man reaches for his beer, he misses the handle and looks up in surprise, as if he's suddenly snapped back to reality. When he finally grabs the tankard, he notices Rotti studying him. He gestures a greeting with a smile and a nod, but then returns to his book.
In the meantime, the innkeeper comes back, puts a beer and a bowl of hot goulash in front of her, and starts talking again. It quickly becomes simply a background droning sound to Rotti. She eats and rests, until on the floor above, there is a crash, as if something heavy had fallen to the floor. Both the innkeeper and the white-haired man look up at the ceiling, but when nothing else is happening, they let it go. Rotti startles a little.
Then there's a scratching sound from above and it sounds like someone is dragging something across the floor.
Rotti swallows a gulp of beer and, staring at the ceiling, asks the innkeeper "If I may, is this normal here?"
The innkeeper also looks concerned.
"Magister?" He turns to the old man. "Did something happen to your friend? Doesn't he need help?"
The magister breaks away from his book and puts it down. They all listen for a moment, the sound has suddenly stopped, but soon it's back.
"Well, I thought he was asleep," the magister says, getting up. "I'd better go check on him. He was actually getting better, I thought." And he heads for the stairs to the upper floor.
Rotti stands up, too, uncertain though as she is. "I'm a cleric, if anything... I can help."
"Ah, that would be very kind of you, miss. I did treat him, but then again, I'm not a healer, am I? Sorry, I'm magister Harant, an alchemist."
"Rotti," she smiles a bit.
And they go up the stairs, into a short corridor lined with doors to the rooms on both sides. The magister comes to one of the doors, knocks and opens it. There are four narrow beds, one of which is occupied by something with a lot of feathers.
"Are you okay?" the magister asks, "we heard some noises downstairs-"
But then he stops as the scraping and sliding sound comes again, from a different door across the hall.
"That's my room," he says, confused, "but there's no one there."
He turns to that door, opens it, and then freezes. He even seems to have stopped breathing. Rotti peeks around his shoulder, hiding behind him just to be sure. The room is very similar to the first one, except it has been thoroughly trashed. And in the middle of the room lies... something.
It could be a huge carcass, but it looks too alive for that. The massive head is half covered with lizard skin, the other half showing bare bone between tangles of raw muscles. Below the neck is something like a body, but most of it seems to be missing. Six limbs are growing out of the half-formed body, yet only the front left is complete, ending in sharp claws which the monster digs into the floor as it slowly pulls itself forward. The other five legs are stunted, spasmodic and non-functional. But then Rotti notices that the flesh on the skull appears to be growing and that the skin is tightening around the gaping wounds, that the lame limbs are quickly lengthening and even the buds of new claws are starting to show. And yes, there's also the creature's single eye. Amber in colour, almost as if it glowed with an inner light. Focused at the magister, who has gone strangely gray, as if there was a layer of dust covering him.
Rotti slams the door closed. Behind them, she can hear the monster getting closer and closer. In the other room, the feathered creature has woken up. He looks like an overgrown owl huddled under a duvet.
"Hi, I'm Rotti, but that doesn't matter right now," Rotti half whispers, half calls at him. "We have a problem. Something petrified the magister, I guess, and we'll probably end up the same if we don't do something like immediately."
"Shit," the feathered guy says as he jumps out of bed. "Shit, shit, shit. I'm Toxin, by the way. Pleased to meet you. And shit." He pulls a satchel from under his bed and hurries over to the magister as he rummages through it. "Nothing in here... I have nothing. Shit."
The monster hits the door.
Rotti winces. "So... Any plan?"
"Barricade the door? We can try to drag the magister away and then hide somewhere. The rest of my party is gone now, but they should be back by evening at the latest. If the door holds until evening, we can take care of that thing. My party has some, y'know, stab-happy people."
"Oh-kay. Sure."
Yet they can already hear the monster slamming its claws into the door. They push the magister to the wall and take one bed from the first room, but as they're just about to prop it against the dangerously shaking door, a claw goes right through the wood and leaves a long gash behind.
“Shit, shit, shit,” says Toxin.
"Mirror?" Rotti blurts out.
“Good idea, but I don't have any."
"Well, we could try to find one, but..." She bites her lip. "Or I might try using a light spell? To dazzle that thing?"
“That might actually w-” and then Toxin jumps at her.
At that moment, the door almost explodes. Three claws and the head of a huge lizard, which is already growing its second eye, push through the wreckage. Toxin just barely manages to knock Rotti out of the way, so the razor sharp claws miss her by a hair's breadth. Judging by the cracks spreading on the walls, the monster probably won't stay trapped in the room much longer.
"Okay," Rotti says, lying on the floor. "I'll blind it temporarily and you then permanently. Ready?"
The wall becomes a cloud of shards and splinters and spills out into the hallway. One floor down, the innkeeper is yelling and a woman is screaming. The monster squeezes into the corridor, slamming into the magister's statue, and roars.
"Or we could run," Toxin says.
"Samal protect us," Rotti murmurs, but she's too shaken to move.
Toxin fishes some kind of vial out of his satchel and throws it at the monster, pulling Rotti towards the stairs at the same time. Whatever was in the vial splashes over the monster's head and begins to sizzle menacingly - and the monster roars in pain and rage. It starts thrashing about, twisting and tearing until it forces its way back to the destroyed room, slapping the two adventurers with its tail in the process. They roll down the stairs, wood creaking and walls shattering above them.
As they land in a heap on the floor of the inn, screams of alarm, then fear, then pain are heard from outside. From the village.
"What in the name of the Three-That-Are-One is going on?!" the innkeeper shouts.
He grabs a baton he had hidden under the bar counter and opens the main door. Rotti and Toxin glimpse a huge lizard swallowing one of the villagers under the oak tree. Then it gazes at the innkeeper, who turns to stone in mid-stride. The door swings back on its hinges and closes again.
***
From the diary of Yanzar, 27th to 29th day of Harvest, 198 Aureum Diem
We entered the inn, wary and properly paranoid. Gour-Gash went to investigate the situation upstairs, and in the meantime we discovered Toxin huddled in the kitchen with a broken wing and a tiefling woman named Rotti tending to him. While we were trying to find out what has happened, Gour-Gash found a statue of the magister lying in front of his destroyed room, his head and one arm broken off. All petrified.
The basilisk skull was not in the magister's room.
Schmee insisted that we must find a way to save the magister and Licmorn convinced him that he will be able to safely fuse a shattered statue this time. Second time's the charm, right? Predictably, when we smeared the magister with a dungeon cucumber, he was depetrified in pieces and Licmorn completely failed to heal him. He bled out immediately. Schmee was inconsolable and frankly quite angry. He was screaming a lot. Even at me.
The sudden, echoing animal roar did not add to the hilarity of the situation either.
When Gour-Gash went to investigate, he heard stomping and sniffing just around a corner. Licmorn threw a tankard of beer out of the window to attract (or distract) the beast, and immediately a large eye, definitely a basilisk's, peered inside. He shot it with an arrow and Gour-Gash rushed outside to meet the creature in melee. Though fighting with one hand over his eyes, he managed to keep the basilisk busy and the rest of our group brought it down with sustained shower of arrows and magic. Then we gathered a large pyre of wood and burnt the bodies of the basilisk and the magister, wary of further reanimations. With the setting sun and the crackling of the fire, only Licmorn's harp sounded in the night.
Also Schmee apparently packed up his things and left.
The next day, we collected the survivors from the village, hiding in the woods, and feasted on the food and booze left in the inn. Licmorn won some gold by drinking everyone under the table. The next next day, we set of towards Balalán. Rotti looked quite uneasy about our destination, until afer some probing she confined in us that she is viscount Malévol's wife and currently on the run. Well, we will have a week to figure something out.
From the diary of Yanzar, 32nd day of Harvest, 198 Aureum Diem
Today, we happened upon an overturned wagon in the middle of nowhere. Wolves gathered around it, tearing at some corpses. Licmorn threw them some sausages and they decided to take the bribe and run. After a closer inspection of the crime scene, Rotti realized that the wagon belonged to a tax collector - her husband's tax collector. The guards lying around had been slain by a blade, not fangs, though, and there were tracks leading to the forest, as if someone had dragged something heavy - and the chest with the taxes was gone.
We followed the tracks from the valley up into the mountains, until we came upon a small river springing from a rock face. The sun was already setting and campfire flickered between the boulders at the foot of the cliff. Rotti and Gour-Gash agreed on a tactic of confusion, where Rotti would play a damsel in distress pursued by a barbarian brute, to discombobulate possible lookouts. What they found instead was one sleeping and drunk bandit, though he was discombobulated alright when Rotti woke him up by repeatedly kicking him. Behind the campfire, an entrance to a dark tunnel loomed. We tied the lookout up and dragged him away from the tunnel, so that we could interrogate the young man in peace and learn more about the wherebouts of any danger or gold in the underground. Unfortunately, he was pretty out of it, so I went to have a look at the place myself, taking on the form of a panther.
Immediately, the tunnel forked into three passages, but taking the straight and narrow path, I found a place where it opened into a larger cave, overlooking the underground part of the river we came here alongside. The cave kept going further, but I was more interested in a shaft in the ceiling above the water, from which faint light was coming. I returned for the rest of the group and we decided to climb up the hole. Still in my panther form, I easily jumped over the river and climbed the rock face on the other side. Licmorn jumped after me, but he was way short and the strong current immediately started dragging him under. Gour-Gash and Rotti managed to throw him a rope, though, so I let them to save him and climbed up the shaft.
I found myself right in the bandit' hideout, where two women were roasting a horse leg over a fire pit. They started screaming for help, but I wanted to have a peek at the next room. I got an axe in the face for my trouble. I guess I deserved that. Barely evading a second swing, I jumped down the shaft and landed in the river. The others have apparently started to fight a couple of giant wolves in the meantime, but thankfully Licmorn had the presence of mind to help me out of the water before I drowned.
The wolves were slowly pushing Gour-Gash back and the tunnel was too narrow for anyone else to assist him, and then we heard many feet coming running from the other direction. We were stuck. Licmorn decided that the best way to get out of this situation is to climb up the shaft and before anyone could stop him, he jumped into the river again. We had to pull him out again, while Gour-Gash was barely holding off the giant wolves. With the persuasive power of an arrow in the face, we stopped the bandits' charge, and Gour-Gash finally downed one wolf, scaring the other away. We made a tactical retreat, still exchanging arrows with the bandits, but not before Rotti managed to shoot Gour-Gash in the back and nearly kill him.
We ran towards the forest's edge, the bandits spilling from the cave behind us and preparing their pursuit. A quick plan was formed. Rotti and I were to go further into the forest while Gour-Gash and Licmorn would hide and then flank our pursuers. They disappeared into the bushes, but before we could get further than some hundred feet, I noticed the glow of a fire. Two mercenaries of viscount Malévol, apparently those who survived the bandit ambush earlier, were camped here. One of them was called Brent, and the other slept like a log. Then we heard the bandits drawing close, so Brent and I prepared to fight side by side. There was the big guy with an axe, several other bandits and an elderly druid riding the one remaining giant wolf. They saw us and charged, but at that moment Licmorn stepped from behind a tree and released a massive barrage of magic, taking several of the bandits down. Then he turned into a flower pot, but I don't think that was fully intended. Unfortunately, it was us who were distracted by the sudden transformation of our sorcerer, and the big guy with an axe used the opportunity to get to Rotti and cleave her down. In retaliation, I burned him to death. Then I went to administer first aid to the bleeding and unconscious Rotti while the others mopped up the remaining bandits. Apparently, the druid has disappeared on his wolf the moment the fight went sideways for their side.
We settled around Brent's campfire, deciding to try for some sleep while keeping careful watch for the druid. And indeed, during my patrol he returned, attempting to ensnare me in some enchantment. But luck was on our side and I roused Gour-Gash before the giant wolf could pounce at him, and along with Brent we had quickly slain them both. The druid's tattoo - a goblet overgrown with blackberries - revealed him to be a member of the black druids my master was hunting for. Interesting...
After some quality wolf steaks in the morning cooked by Mirek, the heavily sleeping mercenary, we returned to the cave - a second attempt, now with next to no resistance. We captured one of the remaining bandits and he led us to their treasure - a chest full of tax money was placed under a ceiling-high statue of a muscular man with a veiled face, the statue badly damaged. While we were busy dividing the loot, out captive somehow managed to escape his restrains - or so Licmorn says...
We also found a spiral staircase with the entrance arch bearing an inscription:
"Closing darkness frights the mind, yet oft-times light does naught but blind."
I persuaded the group - and did it take some effort - to climb the stairs blindly and with no light. No one was hurt or lost or whatever other trap was lurking there, so it was clearly the right decision, yet the others failed to properly congratulate me.
Anyway, we found ourselves in a grandiose corridor with a tapestry depicting a Dark One's triumph - a woman with a veiled face followed by a veiled army slaughtering through many different species and cities. Around the corner behind a broken bronze gate covered in scorch marks was a hall with a long table, the whole top of the table taken by a massive map of the Trollish Mountains, with tiny forts and towers and cities marked, and figurines bearing the standards of the Dark Ones and presumably their enemies standing all over it. We didn't recognize most of the iconography, but one figurine had the coat of arms of the Malévols. Around the table, some nicely decorated chairs were arranged with old corpses sitting in them, the corpse at the head of the table being pinned down by a silver spear through its back. The remains of their clothes bore golden military insignia.
While most of us investigated the map, Brent went to rummage through the cabinets standing by the walls, and soon he found a secret door. Behind it, there was a small, simple room with a heavily reinforced and rune-inscribed chest, but Brent didn't hesitate and opened it post haste. It seemed rather critically easy. Inside, we found a suit of black material that included gloves, boots, a hood and a mask, which would cover every inch of one's body if donned. There was a mechanical egg inscribed with countless runes, too, oozing deathly magic - and it had a big red button on top.
After some persuasion, we forced Mirek to put on the suit, yet nothing bad happened to him. Emboldened, Licmorn suggested that he presses the button. He seemed rather reluctant, but we once again persuaded him to do so.
He did so.
"Beep" and ten runes appeared. "Beep" and nine runes remained. Then eight. Seven. Six...
We ran, Mirek shouting after us in confusion. After the few remaining heartbeats, a shimmering wall appeared behind our backs and started to spread rapidly in all directions. Licmorn was the slowest and he fell to the ground the second the wall touched him, lifeless. Then it was Rotti, Gour-Gash, Brent and then I...
GM Commentary:
Well... I sincerely didn't expect them to press the big red button immediately, without any inspection of the device or rummaging through the books and scrolls in the hall. Does this even really count as a TPK?
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