LL at Paul's: Math Problems

Hey there folks. Time yet again for the lowdown on what went down in the Labyrinth Lord game this week.

We started out this week in the floating weapons room, having just scampered away from a bunch of floating weapons, which normally wouldn't be so bad except they were also HITTING weapons.

Were we sane people, and not, you know, adventurers, we probably would have left well enough alone and moved on to other things. However, we hadn't really searched the room very well, but when a place is so well guarded, well, PC greed sensors get set off. Also, our newly acquired henchmensch Fedyeka was lying paralyzed on the ground, so we had to drag the big lug outta there.

After some plotting and planning, we pretty much just sent Kashim and Yøgund (they of mighty blades and nice, low armor classes) in there to finish off the animated hardware. After they dropped two or three, the rest of us felt emboldened enough to go in and soon the magically levitating weapons were all knocked to the ground.

Once that was settled we set about making a thorough search of the room, picking over the forge, the weapons racks, the wooden chest, and the anvil we found there. The Deacon tried taking one of the previously flying maces outside to see what would happen. (Nothin'.)

The big score was in the anvil. We noticed that it was a little off center on the big oaken stump it was mounted on, and with a little collective elbow grease we knocked it off and discovered a fine longsword with a huge ruby in the hilt. Since Yøgund already had a magic blade, and Kashim felt himself a bit indebted right now for being brought back from the dead (plus having regained a different sort of blade when his body regenerated. Ahem....), the warriors bowed out of competition, and it came down to Gentleman Jack and Klint rolling knucklebones for it. Klint won, which shows you shouldn't play dice with a thief who's higher level than you.

Since by now we were pretty dinged up after taking repeated blows to the face and neck from flying bludgeons and cutlery, we decided to camp out for the night. We didn't want to hup it all the way up to the shrine, so we fell back to the room with the magical chalice and basin dedicated to Kor.

We nailed the door shut and set three watches, and it would have been a full night's sleep for everybody, except something started scratching at the door around third watch when we had the two party members with the least impulse control, Yøgund and Gentleman Jack, on duty (and I think young Amos was with them). Yøgund detected evil thru the door, and was getting ready to sally forth, come hell or high water.

He'd just set the young half elf waking everybody up, when a gang of skeletons burst through the door. The Deacon, feeling kind of cranky from getting woke up in the middle of his rest, sat up and turned the bony bastards, sending them all t'runnin' with some angry strums of his silver stringed mandolin.

I'm sorry to say he was a bit huffy when he rolled over and went back to sleep. (Which I'll note, to Yøgund's player, I was playacting. I hope you didn't take it as me being snippy in real life. My responses had the group wondering if they needed to detect evil on me...)

Finally, we all got a night's rest, and patched up the most greviously hurt with a few more Cure Light Wounds spells. We were revved up and ready to keep delvin'.

Since the weapon room was the final room on this level, we decided to go check out the stairway down. Through an error in mapmaking, it also turned out we'd missed a door near the stairway, which turned out to lead to a spiral staircase heading up. We decided to take this new direction, go up and map out the hallways like we'd done on the level we'd just cleared. It seems like it's an effective strategy.

So up we went, and started exploring the halls. Eventually, we found our way to a large courtyard with a fountain with a statue of a lady in the middle of it. There was a large set of double doors to the south, which had been bashed down and allowed sunlight from outside into the room. When we looked out, a vast mountain vista extended before our eyes, leading to the distant sea on the horizon.

Of course, we didn't stand out there letting the orchestral soundtrack swell majestically in the backround. Back into the dank, monster filled hole.

One interesting feature of the courtyard was the fact that the fountain was full of copper pieces and equipped with a Magic Mouth on the statue of the nice lady, which would praise you for helping the poor if you tossed a copper in, and lay a +1 guilt trip on you if you tried to take any out. There was also this sort of slime trail on the floor that traced a random pattern. My suspicion is we'll run afoul of a giant slug at some point, but take that with a grain of salt...

Anyway, the doorway to the west led to more halls, so we kept our mapping strategy in place, finding a complex of hallways that mirrored the halls on the other side of the courtyard.

Soon, we started searching the rooms, turning up a wrecked up feast hall and adjoining kitchen, and another room that was full of card playing ghosts.

Now wait, the reader might say, a roomful of card playing ghosts sounds like a fascinating encounter. Well, they pretty much just all got up and left, walking through a solid wall to the east and vanishing without so much as saying boo! As we explored this side of the complex, these apparitions kept popping up. So right now we're cautiously analytical. I don't recall Yøgund detecting any evil on 'em. From their dress we're guessing they might be ancient Ilmorians (toga party!) I'm sure more will be made of this mystery as we explore this ruin.

Actually, the room/encounter that took up the biggest chunk of the evening's session was a room that presented us with a puzzle. We found a room with three beds and a fireplace, and as we explored the fireplace, we discovered three hidden levers inside, only accessible when you stood in the chimney and faced outward. They moved right and left from center, and bore the heads of a dragon, a skull, and a gargoyle on the knobs.

Since the gaming group is composed of mostly math heavy type people, they started mapping out the different possible combinations on graph paper. I think they calculated about 32 possible variations. Somebody with more math can work out how 3 levers with 3 different positions can play out, I don't care at this point. It did become a running gag for the rest of the evening, though. "You come upon 7 levers." etc. etc.

Since I'm more on the metaphorical/symbolic side of the skill list, I tried to figure out what a dragon, a skull, and a gargoyle could represent to give us a clue, but couldn't figure anything out. To make matters worse, I also lost 3 silver pieces to Klint betting that Gentleman Jack would be set on fire at some point while he tried the levers.

Actually, what happened was a bit scarier at first. We sent the foppish thief in, and when he threw the third lever he let out a strangled gasp and collapsed. We dragged him out of the chimney and did a Cure Light Wounds on him, and were only barely able to tell that he was still breathing.

We laid him on one of the beds and then Kashim, ballsier than ever, climbed in and tried a different combo, using his hammer to push the levers side to side. He also let out a cry and collapsed, and got stretched out on one of the beds too. By this time, we were hoping the bears weren't gonna come back from their pic-a-nic...

Between the Deacon and Yøgund examining the victims, discovering tiny pinpricks on their hands or wrists, and Klint going in and taking a good look at the levers, we figured out that at least two of the levers contained poison needle traps with a paralytic. (Thankfully.)

Yøgund's player came up with a great plan for flipping the levers without touching them. Basically nailing two spikes into the wall on either side of the row of levers, then using a rope with a loop on the end to tug them in the direction we wanted.

So we set about trying a bunch of different combos. This took all of three hours of in game time, during which we got extremely lucky on the wandering monster charts. (In that Paul was rolling bupkis.) Finally, the mantlepiece shifted at the right combo, and we found a chest with some lootz inside, namely some gold, silver, platinum, and some gemstones.

From there, we went on to the next room, and discovered a chamber with racks of weapons, an empty wooden case, a cabinet, and two dead/unconscious/paralyzed hobgoblins lying in the corner. Klint pulled his shiv and made sure they were in the "dead" column for certain.

We were a bit nervous of paralytic gas, which seemed to be a popular addition to a room in these ruins, as we set about searching.

When we searched the cabinet, we had a big score! Inside was a robe, and the magical nightcap that we'd been searching for. High five for Klint!

He scampered around the corner to test out his new nightvision Santa hat and we packed up whatever other loot we found in there. I think Kashim availed himself to a pole arm to replace the one that had been de-shafted by the gelatinous cube. I'm not totally remembering if we found anything else in there. Perhaps we should go back and search a bit more next week.

Anyway, as we walked out of the room, we saw a trio of carnivorous apes approaching from the opposite direction, their leader dragging a large tree branch behind him. Without so much as a how do you do, or an ook ook, we charged to the attack.

It was a brief, brutal battle, with Yøgund and Kashim taking point while Gentleman Jack and Klint darted down a side hall and came through a doorway next to the monkeys with a surprise attack sword to the back, and we soon found ourselves with several hundred pounds of bush meat at our feet. (Although I don't recommend the party actually make monkey fritters or anything. Yøgund only has one Cure Disease spell per month, after all.)

Once we'd dispatched the apes, we ended for the night. Just a little coda of action on an otherwise very cerebral session. There's still a lot to explore and puzzle out in this place, although now we've got the nightcap that Klint's been koveting we don't really have a very hard and fast reason to stick around, and we need to get back to Restenford and gear up to go to Stonehell and figure out what the heck happened to Koode and Talin Zin on the behalf of Pelltar the archmage.

Anyhow, thanks again to Paul and the rest of the 10d gamers for a cracking session.

LL at Paul's: Bargain of a Lifetime

Yeah buddy!

Okay, my rate of fire on these game reports seems to be slowing down a bit. I usually do 'em on Sunday afternoons when I don't got anything better to do, and last week we had a power outage so I was sans computre for the rest of the day. So this entry's gonna cover two weeks worth of action.

Anyway, all excuses aside, when last we left our doughty band of adventurers we were staring down the non-slavering non-fangs of a gelatinous cube, one of the true classics of the D&D experience.

I think the gelatinous cube's image suffers from it's description being based on how it fits on a piece of graph paper. In old school notation, 10'X10' is one graph paper square. Doesn't look like much when you're looking at a sheet of graph paper with a map on it.

Or if you think of it as a perfectly square mass of jell-o that maintains it's cubic shape no matter what, so if it were chasing you around a big cavern, you'd conjure the ridiculous image of a giant jello jiggler with a couple skulls and some gold coins embedded following you around.

Here's the thing about a gelatinous cube. It is made for hallways, not rooms. If you want to be creeped out by a gelatinous cube, don't think of it as a goofy, rambling euclidean solid. Envision it as a SOLID WALL OF SLIME THAT WANTS TO EAT YOU.

If you ever read Lovecraft's "At The Mountains of Madness" I have little doubt the gelatinous cube is based on what young Danforth saw coming up the tunnel in Antarctica that made him lose all his Sanity Points and start gibbering about stops on the Red Line (which for you non-Bostonians is one of the main subway lines that runs thru Harvard, among other places).

Context is everything with monsters sometimes...

So anyway, a hallway full of hungry gel was what the group was facing at the end of the prior week's session. We were in this square hallway arrangement surrounding a 20' X 20' room, with an exit to the north and south.

As the thing started sliding toward us, we called a full retreat, but Kasshim, our brave/foolhardy foreign warrior, decided to pull a fighting withdrawl. Sadly, we were all a bit overburdened with crap we'd picked up elsewhere in the dungeon, so the thing was moving twice as fast as us unless we were running all out. So long story short, it engulfed the crap out of him, paralyzing him inside it's jiggulent mass.

I seem to recall we tried shooting at the thing as we fled, but sadly Kasshim quickly perished, and was a slack jawed corpse floating in the invisible gel of the cube. We amscrayed out the north doorway and tried to catch our breath in the little 10X10 hall that led to a east/west hallway to the north. We were down to flinders as far as spells were concerned, all wounded from the prior week's furious battles, and down another party member.

And what was worse, the familiar, but not welcome, scent of more troglodites was wafting up the hallway towards us. Thankfully, it was only two of the nasty reptilian bastards, and we were a bit better about saving vs. their stanke, so as pissed off dungeon delvers at the end of their physical and emotional tether are wont to do, we killed the crap out of 'em.

Still, we'd taken some more knocks, so we decided we'd have to take the risk and hole up for a night's rest, probably in the storage room just down the hall, since it was close, and we could spike the doors closed (although that wasn't a guarantee of a restful night, as I will soon describe).

After we nailed the doors shut, we started drawing our plans for retrieving Kasshim's corpse. This was motivated by two meta game factors. A: He had a potentially interesting backstory it seemed a shame to lose track of and B: his player was absent that week, attending a Sox game, and we felt bad about getting his guy killed in hench mode.

As the night wore on, we heard things moving around outside our nailed shut doors. Something that rattled, that we presumed might be some kind of skeletal undead, and something big that tried the door then started grunting "Who in there?" in a voice that made our heels vibrate on the floor. (Had this been the old Wardicon campaign of the original Helga's Heroes Thursday night group, my paladin Calvert would have answered with a "Meow! Meow I say!".)

We decided discretion was the better part of not being mangled, and kept quiet. That didn't really help, though, 'cos soon the door was getting bashed in, and a big, angry ogre came crunching through the door, shouting "Get out of my house!".

Now, I don't rightly recall totally how this fight went. Part of me wants to say we just ganged up and laid a stabbin' on him, and part of me wonders if I didn't cast Hold Person on him to help settle him down for a little coup de grace action. Either way, we took the ogre down without too much blood loss on our side, although it was a good thing we didn't have much more time left for our rest period since he'd obliterated one of the doors, leaving the room open to the dungeon.

When it came time to move out, we healed everybody up as good as we could, and drew our scheme to kill the cube and rescue whatever might be left of Kasshim from it's wobbly depths.

The plan, as we formed it, was to take advantage of the squareness of the hallway it was travelling in. (By which I mean, lateral squareness. The hallway was a square of 10X10 corridors 40' on a side, with two exits, as I have already stated.)

Our goal was to always be attacking it from a distance, and always from the side it was heading away from. So what we did was divide into two groups, each popping in from one of the two doors and calling out to our comrades which direction it was heading. If it headed toward your group, you fell back, and let the other team know where it was. We planned to use as little hand to hand as possible, as this was certain engulfment, so we armed ourselves with oil flasks and ranged weapons.

And actually, the plan worked pretty well, all told. I can't quite recall the blow by blow, but we led the thing on a merry chase, harrying it from both sides with flaming oil, which made it into a roving sheet of flame coming up the hallway at you. One unforseen advantage the monster had was that when it moved into a corner its flaming side hit the wall, putting out the flame in a sizzle of protoplasm acting like a wet blanket, which was a nice effect on Paul's part. Kasshim even lent a hand, since his floating, skeletonized carcass helped us track the creature's location.

So eventually, which much darting and oil tossing and shouting, we killed it. The unnerving thing, though, is that the thing didn't really let on it was dead. It just stopped moving, which, again, I credit Paul for playing this thing so creepy. We tentatively snuck up on the thing and poked it, and when it didn't start sliding down the hall at us we declared it dead.

Satisfied it wasn't gonna git us, we sliced into the horrible gel and pulled Kasshim's bones out, as well as the plates of his armor and what remained of his weapons. The thing had dissolved everything organic, so no leather straps, clothing, weapon handles, or any other goods not made out of bone, metal, or glass remained. We bagged his bones up in a sack, hoping against hope we could maybe get him raised from the dead as our friend young Amos the half elf had been, although we knew a disconnected skeleton had a lot less chance than a full corpse.

Once we'd bagged up Kasshim for transport, we decided to check out the 20'X20' room that was so fearsomely guarded. There were two poison needle traps and a gelatinous cube in here, so we were figuring it was something good.

Anyway, inside the room, once we'd made sure the door was okay, we found a loose pile of sacks full of copper pieces in the center of the floor. Underneath the pile of sacks we found a square cut in the floor, like some kind of trapdoor, and started chipping away with crowbar and knife tip. We also started exhaustively searching the room for secrets, as a sum of copper pieces hardly seemed worth the fearsome protections outside.

This search eventually revealed a hidden alcove on one wall containing a lever that could go left or right. Turning it left set off a Magic Mouth spell with the usual "WHO DARES? BLAH BLAH BLAH" type boilerplate, including a threat that we should sleep there and someone would come get us. Of course, this was backed up with a cloud of knockout gas filling the room. Thankfully, I think it just caught Yøgund and Gentleman Jack (I'm not 100% certain), but I also seem to recall it not being too big a deal to slap 'em 'til they came around.

This was good, since our shenanigans in the room attracted the thing that was rattling around outside the night before, which turned out to be a carrion crawler, which for those who could possibly be reading an old skule game blog and not know is a kind of giant worm/maggot thingus with eight facial tentacles that'll paralyze you if they touch you. (Lotta paralyzing going on in this corner of the dungeon.)

Anyway, faced with wormy death we joined the battle and layeth upon it a kylling. I think Yøgund gave it the most whacks, fending off its paralyzing tentacles with a lot of good saving throws and well made greaves. I might also recall Klint and/or Gentleman Jack got a backstab in while the monster was busy flapping it's cilia at our paladin. Anyway, it was deaded and we were happy.

Back to the problem of the room, we discovered if the lever was pulled the other way, the square in the center of the room rumbled up from the floor, revealing a small alcove underneath that held a chest. This we bashed open, and found a sum of gold and silver coins. Still a little paltry for what we expected, although I think the difficulty of the cube fight had raised our expectations a bit. We bagged it up with our dead sandlander buddy and beat feet.

One final stop on the way out was the shrine with the statue of Kor and the bronze bowl. We had been planning to just grab the stuff on the altar and split, but after a little investigation, and maybe a little obeisance to Kor (I don't totally remember what we did, just that we did the right thing), we figured out the water in the bowl could heal wounds once a day if drunk, so we decided to not loot/desecrate this area and leave it for when we came back, since there were rooms we hadn't checked out yet.

From there we wended our way out of the dungeon under the shrine of Kor, climbed up to the shrine, maybe camped for the night, then boogied home, since raising our dead comrade had a time limit.

Mercifully, the trip back to Restenford was uneventful. I don't recall us meeting anything on the way.

We hit town and made a beeline right to Almox the Druid, and asked him if he could help us. He said he was deep in our debt for bringing back his son Amos from the gnolls' sacrificial altar, but that our time was fast running out. Also, we'd need to find a gemstone worth 500 gold pieces as a sacrifice, and we were all tapped out of 500 gp gemstones. We'd have to beg, borrow, or steal one, and we had all of four hours to do it in, or Kasshim was lost to us forever.

Dun dun DUNNNNNNNNNNNN!

This is where we ended that session.

So, now that we're at this week's session.

First off, we started planning where we could possibly get a gemstone of such expense. Candidates were the town's ruling Baron, or the big, rich Abby near his castle.

Our thieves started making rumblings about breaking in and ripping the Baron off, which A: struck me as a REALLY bad idea* and B: was something my character, the Deacon, a lawful cleric, did NOT want to know about or be party to. At least do me the courtesy of distracting me or something...

We decided our first stop would be the Abby, although we hadn't been there for a LONG time after we decided they were putting on too many airs with all their fancy decor and whatnot. (Especially Yøgund, so it was good his player was absent that day and we could leave him back at Almox's).

Still, beggars can't be choosers, so we went up there hat (and bag of dead Kasshim bones) in hand to see if we could offer our adventuring services in exchange for 500gp worth of de-corpseing.

Well, the abbot was friendly enough after the Deacon turned on what charm he had. (I've got average charisma, about an 11, but I'm the smooth talker of the group 'cos everyone else used charisma as their dump stat.) He told us he couldn't offer the powerful magic that would bring one back from the dead at the abby, but several days travel away there was a more powerful member of their order who might help us, if we were to enlist the services of a powerful mage to transport us there rapidly.

This was turning into a bit of a runaround, especially since we had a guy right in town who could do the job (although Almox wanted us to keep his ability on the down low, for obvious reasons) and since they couldn't even cough up a lousy 500 gp gem for the promise of adventuring services, we went our way. The only benefit of the trip was the Abbot did hip us to the fact that Falco, the dwarven owner of the Red Cask could obtain valuable items on short notice.

So we hied ourselves over to the drunken pub known as the Red Cask, where we'd hired most of our late, lamented henchmen. We found the joint in full swing with dinner being served, but managed to corral Falco and meet in his kitchen about getting us a 500 gp gem within 2-3 hours. (We had a little more time than that, but I didn't wanna cut it TOO close.) After haggling, we settled on a price of 611 gp, since we were paying for middle men and a rush job and what have you, to be paid in 2 hours when Falco's guy brought the goods around. The gem in question would be a bit "warm" but not "hot", per se.

We had a good time with role playing the oblique dance of innuendo where we tried to determine how much trouble we were buying into. Suffice to say it wouldn't get us turned into frogs by an angry archmage or land us in a dragon's gizzard, but it wouldn't be a bad thing if the gem disappeared for good, which was what it was gonna do if we used it in a resurrection.

So off we went to raise the dough. Those of us that had it each chipped in 50 gp, including Kasshim, who's money the Deacon was holding. We sold Kasshim's horse, and also bartered some of the treasure we found in the dungeon that killed him, namely the scrimshaw pieces and a couple of fine pearls that I think we found in the gelatinous cube treasure room.

To hedge our bets in case Falco's guy didn't come through, we also checked with the archmage Pelltar. If Raise Dead didn't come through, we could try Reincarnation with a high enough level wizard. Actually, Kasshim's player was more excited by that, since the random chart of what you might come back as held some interest. (Truly old school. A random chart is a joy to play with.) We spoke to his apprentice Abracus, who told us the old boy didn't know that one, so back to the Red Cask we went.

Thankfully, the deal went through fine, and we traded most of the party's wealth for a fist sized ruby, which we pocketed, thanking our dwarven fence, and scurried over to Almox's with little time to lose.

Once there, we laid out Kasshim's bones in proper arrangement, laid the ruby on his bony chest, and Almox went to work. As he chanted, the gem dissolved into a gelatinous mass and flowed over the body, congealing into flesh and organs. (Again, nice description, Paul, and oh so appropriate !)

Soon, the features of Kasshim formed, and he was whole again. (Literally! Apparently Kasshim had been a palace eunuch before, but had... re-acquired lost equipment. Happy Birthday!)

Of course, once a body's been raised, they're kind of worthless for a bout a week or so as they receuperate from the worst case of the punies they've ever had, so we carried Kasshim off to the Dying Minotaur and set him up in a nice soft bed to rest up. Almox was pretty drained too, and as his elven wife led him off like James Brown after a concert, we thanked him and went our way.

So, while we were twiddling our thumbs for a week or so, we took care of some business. The Deacon checked around to see if there were any next of kin we could bequeath the remaining wealth from our fallen henchmen Melchoir and Strang. Strang was, sadly, a dead end, but Melchoir turned out to have a brother who was a local farmer, and so I took a goodly sum of gold and silver and turned it over, saying some words of condolence and letting them know that Melchoir was a good man and a good fighter. (Damned unlucky and prone to being mauled, but a good fella.)

We also were approached by one of Pelltar's apprentices to seek out the remains of our former comrade Koode, who had been Pelltar's fourth apprentice, as well as the fate of Talen Zin, both of whom we'd lost in the depths of Stonehell. (I don't really know much about what happened, although as a player I do know that Koode had somehow gotten his face severed. Ecchh...)

We consulted and weighed up our costs, and decided to charge 150 gp for the mission, which included re-equipping costs for Kasshim. We agreed to report back in a weeks time as to our progress, but had a bit of wrangling about when we'd begin, since we wanted to get back to the shrine of Kor and complete our exploration, as we were still wanting to find that magical nightcap that granted night vision. (Well, Klint wanted the nightcap, but any motivation's enough for this bunch...) Eventually we settled the timing and the deal was struck.

We also looked into rustling up some new henchmen. One serendipity was young Amos approached us, and offered us his bow in our service, out of gratitude for bringing his body back to get raised. His other motivation was that said resurrection had tapped his family of the pair of expensive jewels, called the Eyes of the Serpent, that they'd kept around for just such an emergency. (First aid kit by Fabergé), so he was looking to replace them. We signed him on for a full share of any treasure we found, which was double our normal deal, but he brought healing magic to the table as well as his ranger skills, and so was worth the extra.

Otherwise, we hit the Red Cask for more recruits, and we hit the jackpot, character wise. A huge, Russian accented bear of a man in full plate with a two handed sword, named Fedyeka the Bastard. We signed him on for a half share plus our generous HR package (full healing, proper burial, etc.) I'm looking forward to playing him if the Deacon ever buys the ol' farm. He is credit to team. (I was relishing possibly inheriting Melchoir too, but ah well... poor dumb, dead bastard...)

So, soon enough, after getting everyone up on their feet and re-equipped, we set out for the Shrine of Kor, making it there in a couple days on horseback then sending our groom back with the horses and keeping the mule for heavy hauling.

When we got back down into the depths, we found the room full of casks of nasty, stinking liquid had been taken away by some unknown agency, which left us without a source of easy crossing for the crevices that broke the hallway deeper into the dungeon. We made do by crossing via climbing thieves and secure ropes.

From there, we wended our way back to the complex a level up, and checked out the final three rooms we hadn't investigated. These turned out to be a pair of sleeping rooms full of cots, one of which had been ransacked and the other still in decent order, and a room full of racked weapons, none of which seemed to unique if I recall.

As we checked out the weapons room, we heard a familiar rattling from down the hall, and found ourselves face to tentacles with another carrion crawler. Fedyeka, bless is big heart, like bull with extra big heart, went out to fight it and got his dumb, 1st. lvl ass paralyzed, so Yøgund and the Deacon charged it, whacking away at it with sword and staff.

We killed the thing without too much loss for the party, I think maybe getting on of the thieves paralyzed, but then we were stuck with a couple of stiffs, so we dragged 'em back to the room with the cots and laid 'em out, and that's about where we closed down for the night.


Thanks again to Paul, and the 10d gamers for another couple of fun sessions.

Update!

Ah yes, in the comments, our inimitable DM remembered me the last encounter of the night was actually in the weapons room, where we got attacked by a swarm of floating, animated weapons that leapt off the wall and started smackin' us.

The Deacon tried turning 'em but that didn't take, all that seemed to work was hitting 'em with a high roll. (I figure their AC's down around 1 or 2). So we decided to scamper away before we got hacked to bits, even though we'd gotten the swarm whittled down to roughly 1 floating weapon per guy, or maybe even less...

Unfortunately, we'd dragged Fedyeka along as we'd searched, and so when we bugged out we left him lying on the floor in there. Now, thankfully, the weapons didn't seem interested in him, but I think we're going to have to do an extraction or get in trouble with the henchman's local 101 or something. THAT was how this week's session ended. Thanx, Paul.




*The reason stealing from the Baron is a bad idea is that it's a violation of both the "Don't Shit Where You Sleep" rule and my personal "Don't Antagonize Anybody Who Can Spit In Your Food" rule, which are both similar in principle.

The latter rule, when broken down to basics, is that if someone has the power to ruin your day if you piss them off, being as they may be a waiter bringing you your dinner, a billing agent you're calling to fix a mistake on your phone bill, a police officer who's pulled you over, or the supreme feudal authority for the area you're travelling thru, then it behooves you to be on pleasant behavior so as to avoid pissing them off. It's not about being subservient or a pushover, so much as avoiding extra static by not being a dick. It's very simple to prosper using this rule.

LL at Paul's: Crush Groove & Gleaming the Cube

So yet again, here we are, telling tales out of school. Old school, that is. Gaming. With a capital G. Yo.

Yeah, it's late and it's Memorial Day tomorrow so what the heck. Not 100% in the mood to write this but if I don't I won't get around to it later so there you are. Live with the non-sequitors.

So when last we left our heroes, they'd lost their entire back nine to various calamities, and were down to the primary characters without benefit of faithful henchmen/meatshields.

We rested up the night in the Shrine, and climbed down the long shaft to the long tunnel to the dungeon below.

When we got down there, we decided to try a new methodology for exploring, which was to map out all the hallways, ignoring doors, so as to get a good general lay of the land, and THEN going thru and hitting the rooms. This, overall I think, was a pretty good plan of action. I won't bog this post down with every twist and turn we went thru, and will instead hit the highlights of the rooms once we got the halls sorted out.

The only wandering monsters we ran into in all this hallbusting were the survivors of the lizard man pack (pack? I wonder what a plurality of lizard men would be called. A school? A gang? A handbag?) Anyway, we ran into them again, and I think we soundly whupped their scaly butts without too much misery and woe. After last week's troglodyte attack, these guys were literally a breath of fresh air.

The first room we explored fully, and got into trouble in, was a large chamber that seemed to be some sort of nautical museum. There were paintings of ships on the walls, some suits of armor with a vague oceanic theme in their decoration, a chest which we found to contain various pieces of scrimshaw, and these two statues of giant crabs in the northeast and southwest corners, both made out of coral. When we opened up the scrimshaw chest, the statues animated and attacked, which is pretty much par for the course in D&D unless it's an abstract sculpture (Those, instead, usually have curses. It's hard being a curator in a dungeon.)

The group split up and started whaling away on them (note the nautical verb there...heh) I think the Deacon and Yøgund took the one in the left corner while Kashim and the thieves took the one on the right.

I got a couple of good whacks in with the Mojo stick, but things kinda got outta whack in general when the sculpture grabbed the wandering cleric around the middle and kinda started crimping him with maximum prejudice. I actually got taken down to 0 and got a crit effect, namely crushed ribs. Everybody got kinda nervous at that point, and all took a shot at the rampaging crab statue, since the other had been busted to rubble by then. It was a bunch of bad rolling all around, and it looked like curtains for the man with the silver stringed mandolin...

The Deacon was only saved at the last minute by a thrown dagger from the party mage, Elef the halfling, who was in henchman mode that night. By extreme good fortune he did just enough damage to take the thing down, and the Deacon spent both his healing spells on himself to cancel the crushed ribs and put some hit points back on his bones.

The hit was SO fortuitous that I had to get confirmation from Paul, for which again I apologize, since it IS poor manners to accuse a DM of fudging, especially if it benefits you. Paul doesn't run that kinda game though, and this is Old School gaming, baby. Fudging is for bake sales! He showed me the HP tally and by golly it was those 2 hps that made the difference. Especially since Elef has a Strength penalty, so if he'd done anything besides throw the dagger, it woulda been it for the Deacon, as the crab's claw was doing auto damage.

Anyway, enough about my character's near death experience. We squeaked by and that's good enough. We bagged up some of the coral chunks from the crab in case they would be valuable, and swiped the scrimshaw, and set out on our hall exploration.

The next room of note we encountered was what appeared to be some kind of jail, with rows of 5'X5' cells, some with skeletons chained up inside, and a torture chamber at one end. I don't rightly recall what set it off, but we did something that caused this unearthly, howling voice to start bellowing "FREE ME!" ad nauseum.

Eventually, the caterwauling attracted a bunch of skeletons, but they didn't go for much 'cos the Deacon and Yøgund can now both turn undead. Actually, it was a good initial outing in the smiting of the unliving for Yøgund, 'cos even though my silver stringed mandolin is powerful juju against the walking dead, I rolled for crap, wheras Yøgund got a good hit in, spiritually speaking, and turned 'em away. (I may be conflating this encounter with a gang of zombies we met later in this narrative, but regardless, it was a good outing for our resident pants wearing paladin.)

Once the skeletons were de-boned, we loitered around trying to FREEE the shouting spirit, mostly by busting the non-moving skeletons loose from their chains and chucking them out the door shouting "Go! Be Free!", but nothing was working.

It's here we coined a term for what we're discovering is a dungeoneering no-no: monsterbaiting. In other words, getting too focused on one encounter and wasting time that gets converted into greater wandering monster checks, when the prudent move is to Get The Früdje Out! While a certain aspect or foe in the dungeon may be fascinating, keep an eye on the main goal, which is getting out alive and not attracting more attention than you can handle by hanging around.

Don't monsterbait, kids. You'll go blind (when your torches burn out 'cos you've been hanging around a screaming magic mouth for hours.)

Another minor encounter in this area was a room full of yellow fungus that threw out a big cloud of spores when we tossed a torch in there. We slammed the door and decided to give it a wide berth. Fungus, statues shaped like anything, and the color yellow are all vital warning clues that a healthy dungeon delver should pay close attention to. (As pointed out in Michael Curtis' wonderful Dungeon Alphabet. Pick up a copy, won't you?)

We also found a shrine with a baptismal font of some kind in it, which self filled with what we think might be holy water, so we filled some spare vials with the stuff. This came in VERY handy later on, as I shall elucidate in the future. There was also a statue or something there which we had to firmly convince Gentleman Jack Getz not to pocket right away. (Look, if you've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, you don't swipe the golden idol until you've thoroughly stretched and are ready to outrun the poison darts and giant sphere trap...) I'm sure we'll pilfer it when we're ready to exit, but better not to offend the gods while we're still in the field.

Moving on, after we'd fully mapped the halls we entered a crypt in the north quadrant where we ran into a bunch of zombies lying in a room with a big sarcophagus. They got up, and we put 'em down, and like I said earlier I'm not sure if this was the room where the Deacon got lousy rolls and Yøgund got to show his stuff as an undead turner, but once they got turned we hacked 'em up good.

The sarcophagus contained the dried out corpse of a priest of Kor, and he'd been buried with this rod with a bronze sun disk on top, so we swiped it. Again, a little nervous that we were tugging on something that might bite us, but a staff is too hard to pass up, especially since I've been so happy with the mojo stick we got from the gnoll shaman. We need to Detect Magic on it to see, but that's an in town spell, not an in the field spell for our resident mage.

The next door in the north section led to a storage room full of barrels. I'm not remembering much beyond the barrels. I think there might have been some normal sized rats in there, but even if there was something fightable, it wasn't much for being memorable. I'm not even completely sure what the barrels contained. Health and ammo? Me no know...

The final door we hit for this evenings festivities was where we started to accumulate trouble. We walk up to it, and Yøgund turns the latch. And feels a prick on his finger.

Crap.

Well, mercifully it turned out to be a paralytic poison, and not a fail n' die type poison, so we now had a nice temporary stretcher to carry out loot on. (I kid, we probably would have used him as a battering ram before we'd use him as a treasure sled...)

So anyway, the door turned out to lead to this odd hallway that surrounded a room of some sort. We pressed on, I think hoping whatever we found beyond this trapped door would have some kind of poison antidote or something hidden among it's mysteries. We rounded the corner, and found the inner door, but then heard some movement in the hall behind us.

Kashim, our mighty, foolhardy desert warrior, rounded the corner and saw a rat skeleton floating in the air about a foot off the ground. He was about to charge it, when the Deacon came around the corner and urged him to stand off while I tried to turn what I thought was some kind of undead. That didn't phase it, so I pulled one of the vials of what I hoped was holy water and tossed it at it. This stopped in midair about a foot above the rat skeleton, and the sick realization of what I was looking at hit me.

Yep. Always 10'X10' room for jello. It was a fershlugginer GELATINOUS CUBE!

Yeah, thank goodness Kashim didn't end up charging the thing. Of course, we were now isolated as it was blocking our way out. That's where we ended the session, with a paralysed paladin and a perilous pythagorean protoplasm preventing our passage. Perhaps we will prevail, perchance we'll perish. I can't possibly predict. (Okay, I'll stop. Gettin' too much spit on the screen...)


At this point I gotta throw a big old kudosaurus to Paul for one of the best monster reveals I've seen in a while. The floating rat skeleton that we thought was an undead and then suddenly realized was actually something else. It was an impromptu decision on his part 'cos the cube failed it's surprise check, and it was a good way to represent it. CHOICE! Golf claps all around.

Thanks once again to Paul and the 10d gamers for an excellent session.

LL at Paul's: Hamburger Helpers

Tally ho, my peeps. It's time yet again for the weekly run down on the Labyrinth Lord game.

So when last we left our hearty band we were lurking in a stairwell waiting for hobgoblins to come marching down the hall, so that we might present them with an ambuscade. Waiting around is pretty much a bad idea in a hostile, monster infested dungeon, as we learned when we were jumped by a bunch of lizard men last week.

Still, we decided to stick it out, but re-organized ourselves somewhat. We positioned our archers, namely Klint, Gentleman Jack Getz, and Melchior down the west hallway in the hobgoblin detachment's camp, put Kashim and Yøgund in the south branch with lanterns hooded and swords drawn, and positioned The Deacon, Elef the Halfling wizard and his ensorcelled servant Gneal the Gnoll to the north. Our quarry would be approaching from the east, crossing a plank set across a small, bottomless chasm. We posted our Charmed hobgoblin ally Sergeant Grumpus at the chasm to lead our victims into position, and prepared a nasty little trap by sawing most of the way thru the plank.

There were a couple tactical problems with our plan. The big one was hobgoblins can see in the dark, and we can't, and we were keeping our light sources hidden to not tip them off. We were counting on Grumpus to lead them to the crossroads where we'd unhood our lights and get a good shot at them. The other big problem was we didn't know exactly when the hobs were coming and in what numbers.

Eventually, we heard the tromp of feet and the harsh voices of the hobgoblins, marching down the hall toward us with the sound of our enspelled alley urging them on. These hobgoblins are a pretty rum bunch, all told. Very organized and efficient, they don't mess around. They approached our position in a phalanx formation, with polearms deployed to sweep the hall ahead of them.

This is when things started going kinda pear shaped for us. Somehow the bastards had made it across the plank without it snapping. (I guess this was lucky dice rolling on Paul's account.) They weren't surprised when they entered the crossroads, and were ready to respond with force, which they did. The first one to get it was Gneal the Gnoll, polearmed in the gut and down for the count. ("GNO! GNOT GNEAL!!!") Our archers didn't have a really good view, even when Kashim opened his lantern, and so their shots fell short or missed, and they were putting up a really stiff resistance to our fighters. We managed to take down the front rank with a lot of effort, and took a few nasty wounds in the process.

The back ranks retreated back down the tunnel shouting for reinforcements, so we decided to bug out, fighting the middle ranks to secure OUR retreat. With a heavy heart, the Deacon used the gnoll shaman's mojo stick to put Gneal out of his misery, since we weren't gonna spend healing magic on an ensorcelled evil beast, and the rest of us regathered and beat feet across the chasm in the north tunnel which led to the stinky keg room and out. As we fled, we were gratified to hear the distant sound of a board snapping and a hoot of hobgoblinish alarm.

We scampered up the ladder and barred the door in the column of the mountain shrine and settled in to rest up, totally tapped of all but a healing scroll with two spells. We were in pretty bad shape, so we decided to just rest the rest of the day and get a full night's sleep.

It was round about the second watch, and it was Melchior and The Deacon's turn to sit awake when...

HOLY CRAP AN OWL BEAR!

Yeah, gotta love those wandering monsters, Paul.

So this huge, angry mass of bear gristle, claws, and feathers wedged itself between the pillars of the shrine and came in looking for a midnight snack.

Now, I'm gonna digress here for a second and state my opinion of the owlbear. A lot of internet gaming wags like to claim that they're goofy, or ridiculous, or a combination of two cuddly animals.

To this, I say bearfeathers! A bear is pretty much one of the worst things that can happen to you in the real world, so anything with that in it's makeup is something to be reckoned with. As for an owl, well, look at these claws.

And also note the beak.

I think too many graphic designers and tchotchke artists have stylized the owl into a cutsey poo little aerial garden gnome, and that's what colors people's opinions of owls. The wise old owl, blah blah. The owl is wise, people, because he knows where the bodies are buried...

As for me, I grew up in the country, and have seen what an owl can do to rodents, or chickens, and the primeval, dinosaurian/avian gusto with which they do it. If you're a field mouse, an owl is silent death from above and a sad footnote in the mouse actuarial tables as an owl pellet. Now make that big enough to do the same to a human...

Add to all this the fact that due to their unnatural nature, the beasts are purported to be crazy insane, tree snapping, twist the head off of a full grown moose angry at all times, and a truly alarming picture is painted.

Nothin' cute or ridiculous about an owl bear. Sorry kids.

Anyway, the Deacon and Melchoir sprang to defend our sleeping comrades, with the Deacon whaling away with the mojo stick and Melchoir drawing his sword and raising his shield. Our brave henchman apparently managed to get a wicked hit in on the beast, enraging it to the point that it grabbed him in an owl hug and proceeded to crumple him up like remedial origami. (See! This is what I'm talking about!) The Deacon hauls off and lets the beast have it with a mighty wack of the mojo stick, finally felling the monster.

The next step was unfurling the scroll of healing spells the Deacon had on his person and giving it to Melchoir with both barrels, as bits of him looked ready to fall off due to a lack of connective tissue and internal structure. The two cure light wounds got him back on his feet, another near brush with his nemesis, nature...

The next morning we were back to having spells recharged, so I did a round of healing and reviving on the rest of the party, so that we were approaching fighting trim once more. I think we decided to camp out another day to heal up some more, so it was on the second day we girded our loins and salleyed forth (or down, in this case.)

When we got down into the dungeon again, we saw that the hobgoblins had been busy. We found our plank across the north passage chasm, and when we checked it we saw that it had been similarly sawed through to make a trap. Clever bastards... So we went back to the keg room and pulled a fresh plank out of one of the kegs, and took the doctored board and put it across the east chasm on the very off chance it'd get some unaware dungeon monster, hopefully a hobgoblin.

From there, we decided to make our way up the stairs and do some more exploring of the complex. We found a hall going east and west at the top of the stairs and checked it out. There was a small alcove with a shrine to the sun god who the big shrine upstairs was devoted to, and to the south we found a complex of rooms that seemed to betoken a barracks of some kind. There was a bunk room, a room full of tables, a combat practice room with dummy swords and shields, and another bunk room.

In the first bunk room, we were menaced by a couple of ghouls, but the Deacon's silver stringed mandolin turned 'em around and put them to flight, or they would have fled if the fighters hadn't chopped 'em down like corpse eating firewood.

As we entered the final bunk room, a nasty stench assailed our nostrils, and a band of seven slimy, scaly, crested lizardoids leapt out of the darkness at us. Troglodytes! We drew our swords and charged forward to the attack.

At this point, I will give my opinion on troglodytes, although not in the extended rant fashion of my opinion about owlbears. Long story short:

AAAIEEEE!

Seriously. We WISHED they had slingshots...

Troglodytes are MEAN MOTORSCOOTERS. You got the overpowering stench that causes nausea and combat penalties, you got two HD, and you got, worst of all, Claw/Claw/Bite. The last bit is the worst. Three attacks in a round is a LOT of attacks, even if individually they don't do a lot of damage. So yeah, we stepped into a freakin' meatgrinder.

I think only Yøgund, with his incredible 1 AC, and the Deacon, not being a front liner, made it out with more than 5 hp. Sergeant Grumpus fell victim to their gnashing claws and slashing teeth, and, much more tragically, our favorite henchman Melchoir's luck finally ran out, bit in the gut and thru the neck. Kashim got his arm bit thru to the bone and pulled out of it's socket. I think another party member took a nasty crit to the nethers as well, but I'm not recalling. I put it down to PTSD.

Anyway, we finally managed to put the slimy hellbeasts down, and gathered up our wounded and dead and scampered for safety. Another morning ruined...

At the top of the ladder in the mountain shrine we took stock. We considered seeing about bringing Melchoir back with the aid of Almox the druid, but sadly we would have needed A: A huge, expensive jewel and B: to get him back in a very short timespan. (I guess I misunderstood last week when they told me they raised young Amos. I thought it was the magic healing pool, not a bog standard Raise Dead spell.) Well, we were short on expensive rocks, and we were deep in the mountains having sent our horses back with Garund, our groom.

So, with deep regret, we buried brave, faithful, pitifully unlucky Melchoir on the mountainside with his armor, wolf pelt cloak, and cherished sword. We split up his equipment, and the Deacon took charge of his remaining money, with an eye towards seeing it get to whatever next of kin he might have. I've still got a bag full of coins from Strang that I need to bequeath as well. I'll have to make some inquiries when we get back to Restenford.

And thus it was with a funeral and much knitting of wounds that we ended this session. We were down to core party members, having lost our entire second string. How would our team fare as we move into the next quarter? Tune in next week to find out. I know I will.

Thanks again to Paul, for all of his lovely wandering monsters, and thanks to the 10d gamers for another awesome session.

LL at Paul's: Idea men.

Hey ho! Yet again we have the word from the Labyrinth Lord game.

The week before I didn't manage to attend because of crunchiness at work, so to give a repetition of the capsule version of our group's adventures with the Deacon in hench-mode.

Apparently, as we searched the gnoll camp, we found that the subject of our search and rescue, young Amos the half elf ranger, had already been sacrificed to whatever carrion diety the gnoll's worshiped, so with heavy heart the group carried his corpse back to Almox and Feldara.

Luckily, the magic pool that Almox presided over apparently had a "reset" feature installed, and through its power the hapless lad was brought back to life. Hugs all around.

From there, I guess the group decided to go after the magical, see in the dark night cap that we'd heard about from the sage in Bridgefair, so we set out toward the mountains to the north. We hired a wilderness guide by the name of Mac the Lizard, who was willing to guide us thru the mountains to the shrine referenced in the scrap of poetry we'd bought.

On the way, we encountered and battled a pack of wild boars, defeated them, and then proceeded to convert them into a mother lode of bacon. This is where the Deacon joins the narrative as a fully functioning party member.

Anyway, we had a ways more to go, so we travelled on through the wilderness. The following night, we camped on the mountainside and set watches. About the time of the second watch, which I think was the Deacon and our new thief, Gentleman Jack Getz.

As we sat up watching and listening, we heard the sound of wolves howling, getting closer and closer. Getz hurriedly awoke Yøgund the paladin, and none too soon, as a quartet of HUGE wolves padded menacingly into the edges of the campfires light and sprang to the attack.

Yøgund charged up the hill with his magic sword and stood in battle with two of the beasts, as a third chased Getz back toward the rest of the sleeping adventurers. The fourth charged the Deacon, who took up a burning log from the fire and whaled on the slavering beast's noggin'.

Elef the halfling, crouching behind his ensorcelled gnoll flunky, whom we'd dubbed "Gneal", managed to cast sleep, sending one of the pair attacking Yøgund to beddybye and making his job a lot easier.

The Deacon got a couple of decent hits in on his wolf, but the thing wasn't catching fire as well as I would have hoped (Paul kept rolling 1's on fire damage.) while the fourth wolf savaged the rest of the group.

Our wilderness guide, Mac the Lizard, lived up to his moniker and scuttled away into the darkness while the unarmored contingent of the party got gnawed on pretty well. Soon, things were looking grim for the group, with a couple of the team getting reduced to 0 and taking some injuries on Paul's critical injury table, so the Deacon fell back, waving his flaming log in the wolf's mush, to see if he could slip some heals in there.

Finally, Yøgund managed to finish off the beast he was fighting, while Klint (I think, or maybe Elef) slipped around and slit the throat of the sleeping wolf. This tipped the balance and made the remaining pair decide that discretion is the better part of valor and slip off into the darkness. The Deacon healed up the party members suffering from severe HP deficiencies and we went back to bed.

The next morning, another round of patching up, fixing any broken limbs and the like, and we were on our way. We got to the foot of the mountain trail leading up to the shrine we sought, but it was barely there, and much too narrow for our horses. Mac the Lizard, who'd returned in the morning after our wolf issues, accepted the rest of his payment and departed, followed soon after by young Garund Greyward, our groom, who took our horses back down the road to Restenford.

We hiked into the mountains, following the winding goat track, and eventually came to the shrine, a pillared, domed affair set into the side of the mountain, with a standing statue of it's deity standing in the center with upraised palms. The statue looked to have at one time held something like a mirror or lens in its hands.

The scrap of poetry we'd managed to barter from the sage in Bridgefair referred to a door being indicated by the rising of the sun, so we surveyed the landscape, looked around the shrine, and by guesswork and eyeballing figured out where the sun would point at the time referenced by the poem. This led us to a pillar, which when searched revealed a hidden door with an iron run ladder leading down into the depths of the mountain.

Since we were still a bit bunged up from the wolf encounter the prior day, we braced the secret door shut, to avoid any subterranian surprises popping up on us, and bedded down for the night in the relatively peaceful surroundings of the shrine. Once the Deacon's spells had been recovered, I topped up those who needed some hit point refills and we made our way down into the depths.

At the bottom of the shaft, we found a long, loong, loooooooong tunnel leading to the south, about 2 hours worth of walking. At the end of this tunnel we found a door, beyond which was a room storing huge wooden casks that were revealed to be full of some noisome, sulfurous smelling liquid. In one corner of the room we found the corpses of a trio of dungeon delvers. We also found a giant spider lurking in the broken out shell of one of the huge barrels, which sprang to attack us.

Yøgund took the creature on from one side while either Melchior the hireling or Kashim of the Long Sands took on from the other, as Elef, who I think was the one who discovered the thing, beat a hasty retreat to take cover behind Gneal the Gnoll.

It was a fairly straightforward fight, the cool part was, for me, that the Deacon got to use a new magic weapon to finish the beast off.

The party had gotten a hold of the gnoll shaman's staff after we looted the bodies, and it had turned up magical when a Detect Magic was cast. Elef had been carrying it, but it turned out halflings can't use weapons that size, so it was given to me. (Perhaps after the wolf fight, now that I think on it.) When Gneal the Gnoll saw it in my hands, rattling with bird skulls and an entire mummified squirrel tied to it with a thong, he intoned the word "Breeshk" which we took for the command word. So as we fought the spider, I said the word and the staff started to buzz with power. I took a wack at it, and did 2d6 points of damage, causing the thing to kerplode and spray spider guts all over the party's front line. AWESOME! So yeah, now the Deacon's got a mojo stick!

(I hope the rest of the group and the internet in general will forgive me going on about awesome stuff my character's got. It's my blog, after all...

If you don't like it, get your own blog, or your own mojo stick!)

Anyways...

So from there we struck out through a door to the south. We found a short hallway leading to another doorway at a corner going west. Checking inside, we found a mud room. No, not a room for taking off muddy shoes, a room with a shallow pool and a thick layer of slippery mud coating the floor. Most of us took a glance around and moved on, but Klint the thief became convinced that there HAD to be something good in the pool, and proceeded to strip down and wallow around in the mud for a while.

Yes, well. Good show and all that. Whatever d's your 20's.

Once the mystical wonders of the mud room had been exhausted, we rounded the corner and found a 5 foot wide fissure breaking across the hallway. After much deliberation and suggestion of Rube Goldberg type devices we used a rope around the waist to secure ourselves as we leapt across, which is good since I think the Deacon blew his jump check like three times in a row and had to be repeatedly hauled back up to try again. Embarrassing.

After we'd all gotten across, we found ourselves at a crossroads of tunnels. I'm not 100% sure if we went back the west corridor or got jumped at the crossroads, but we ran into a cadre of hobgoblins, who came down the corridor at us with polearms leveled in a narrow phalanx formation. As Yøgund and Kashim braced the front row with their heavy AC and flashing blades, the spellcasters got to work. The Deacon cast Hold Person on one of the hobs, while Elef worked his Charm Person on another. Thankfully, this one spoke common (unlike Gneal the Gnoll, who just followed Elef around like a slavering, carrion scented puppy.) and was asked to kindly start slashing up his former comrades. Between the spellcasting and a strong offensive line, we beat back the hobgoblins to their camp at the end of the corridor.

We put the held one and a couple of others who surrendered to the sword, after a brief debate about trying to charm them. (Long story short, not a good idea 'cos we'd have to have them stewing around looking for a chance to bust loose for two days while Elef recharged his spells.)

The charmed hobgoblin identified himself as Sergeant Grimmer (later dubbed Sgt. Grumpus in the inevitable distortion of names that happens in table talk). He was part of a larger contigent of hobgoblins who'd been sent to scout for a conquering army intent on taking some local sea ports for conquest of the human lands. (Note to the party. THIS IS IMPORTANT! I think we need to get back to Restenford and drop a couple copper pieces about this...) When Grumpus let it be known that there was another force of hobgoblins waiting down the east corridor for his group to return at lunchtime, the party's thinking caps all whirred into motion, and we started coming up with nefarious plans to ambush them. (Now any mages out there with Detect Sarcasm will note that the screen is glowing a bit at this point.)

We scouted down the corridor in question, and found a similar fissure in the floor to the one we'd jumped earlier, only this one was bridged with a plank. We discussed sending our man Grumpus down to lure a contigent of them over so we could take them piecemeal, which didn't seem like a bad idea. The other idea was to lie in wait for them for an ambush, although we were aware that it was going to be three hours before the larger group got suspicious of the detachment's lateness and came looking. Still, this is the plan we came up with, and we were sticking to it. For good measure, we pulled the plank and made a cut thru it, so that the first hob across would break thru it and fall.

So we waited at the base of a set of stairs about 10 feet past the south corridor. For three hours. At this point I'll forgo any literary artifice and state flatly THIS WAS A VERY BAD IDEA.

As we crouched on the stairs, convinced of the brilliance of our scheme, a party of lizard men came down the stairs behind us, intent on grabbing a bite of delicious mammal. Yes, in our machiavellian brilliance, we'd reminded our DM just what wandering monster checks were good for, as he mentions on his post on the session. Since our modus operandi is to put strong fighters in the front and weaker guys in back, of course they're exactly in the right place at the right time (for them).

After some frantic repositioning and waving of mojo sticks, we managed to fend them off and send them packing, and thanks above to the merciful Allmaker that we didn't have a bunch of pissed off hobgoblins on our other flank.

It was here, as we caught our breath, that we ended the session.

I hope this all doesn't come off as too snarky, as I'm trying to be more tongue in cheek than anything else, and Lord knows I'm as much implicated in this peccadillo as the rest of the group, so I'm not trying to come across as Deacon Know it All. I just think this session we crossed the line from "clever" to "too clever", and allowed our tactics to get overly baroque. It happens when the generation of ideas becomes too free form without any overriding focus. Well, ya live n' learn, and hope that it don't cost ya too many Cure Light Wounds.

Anyway, thanks once again to Paul and the 10d gamers for a fun session.

Rest in Peace, Mister Frazetta

Just moments ago on Grognardia I learned of the passing of Frank Frazetta. As a professional illustrator and a fan of fantasy art, this is a significant event to me, and so I'll add to the doubtless soon to be huge welling of regret.

The man's work was, to use an inadequate phrase, amazing. Whatever the medium, be it oils, pen and ink, pencil, sculpture, he was one of those lucky artists who's more like a spigot through which the crackling energy of the universe pours onto the page or canvas. There was nothing mannered or affected about his art, it was all honest and glorious, power backed up with tremendous skill. His artwork is summed up to me in this quote from Robert E. Howard's Conan, with whom Frazetta's art is forever and indelibly bound:

"Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."

This is the essence that was mixed in with his paint. This is what came through in his imagery.

I'd heartily recommend checking out Painting With Fire to get more of a picture of what sort of guy Mr. Frazetta was. He was one of the last true masters, and I honor his memory, and take heart in the amazing legacy the man left behind him.

LL at Paul's: Pit n' Git.

Yes, brethren and sistren, it's time once again for my regular rundown of how things are going in Paul's Labyrinth Lord game.

Last time, we'd spent a lot of time around the city of Bridgefair, buying and selling and talking and jumping off of tavern roofs. We'd acquired a selection of fine horses and a groom to take care of them, and were preparing to leave the city.

As we were making ready, we were approached by a foppish young ne'er do well who introduced himself as Gentleman Jack Getz, who seemed intent on selling us some silverware he'd acquired. He seemed an affable enough fellow, although none of us were quite prepared to buy anything off of him. He started following us around, but remembered he had an appointment elsewhere when we informed him we were going to Captain Godsarrow to report that we were leaving town.

In short order we were ushered in to the harried guardsman's office to let him know we were leaving. He asked if we knew when the rest of the Paladins of Palenthor were leaving, and we said we didn't know. The question led Yøgund to ask a few probing questions about the town guard's political leanings, as far as the war of succession between the Princes Guay and Hank were concerned, but the conversation wrapped up before it led anywhere dangerous, and we were on our way.

As we saddled up and headed out of town, we were pursued out the gates by Jack Getz, who begged us to allow him to join our group, as he suddenly had a rather urgent need to leave town. We shrugged and agreed, putting him up on Melchoir the henchman's horse as we set out for Restenford.

As we traveled, it became apparent that the city bred Mister Getz had ill prepared for a journey thru the wilderness, as he'd neglected to buy travel rations or any useful equipment. We loaned him some of our extra rations, and he scavenged along the roadsides as we traveled.

On the second day out as we stopped by the road to have lunch, the roguish gentleman went into a nearby woods to check out a stream that was running through it, hoping to maybe find some food there. What he found instead was a trio of huge lizards sunning themselves on a large boulder in a crook of the stream bed. The beasts looked at him hungrily, and he turned and fled back toward the rest of the party, with the hissing reptiles in hot pursuit.

As Getz ran for cover behind Gerund, our groom, and his mule, Kashim of the Long Sands and Yøgund stood and drew their swords, fighting the beasts to a standstill and then slaying them. The three huge reptiles were brightly colored, one red, one blue, and one green, so we set about skinning them and then roasted the meat for a couple days worth of eating, enough to last us on our way to Restenford. The rest of the journey was uneventful.

Upon arriving in our old port of call, we were met by the Baroness' man, a devotee of Palinthor whom Yøgund had recruited to help run the charitable house that he'd established in the sleepy fishing villiage. The older gentleman was in a bit of a tizzy, because his co-proprietor, Feldara the elf and wife of Almox the Druid, was allowing elves to stay at the Palinthor house.

Now, we were expecting this kind of static, since the old boy seemed a bit down on the pointy of ear, but the other issue was that these elves were kind of political, spouting off about how great Prince Guay was to all who would listen. Yøgund was placed in the uncomfortable position of refereeing between the two factions who he'd entrusted with running his charity. He generally established that the house was open to all who needed to stay there, but that it would be a politics free zone. He also expressed a preference for it to be available to folks who were more down on their luck than just your average traveller, but then that's kind of tough to judge, and there's a question of how much can be done in such a small community. He did find out about a local fisherman who'd lost his boat, and put some of the mound of gold he'd acquired toward helping the poor salt out. At the Deacon's suggestion, he decided to treat it more as a loan, with a little bit of the fisherman's catch being dedicated to supplying the Palinthor House in return for the help he'd received.

That matter kind of settled (although I think this elf/human tension thing's gonna rear up again), the other big issue we found was that our friend Amos, the young half elf yeoman, had gone missing while traveling thru the Kellman woods. Feldara was quite worried, and so we went around to Almox's to talk to him. We also bore the sad news that Liam, our one armed elf companion, had died as he'd lived, being mauled by animals.

This brought us to the uncomfortable realization that Almox had Liam's severed arm, now preserved and mounted, to deliver to us. Thinking quickly, we took the arm around to the Palinthor House and hung it on the wall of the entry hall with an upraised palm and a sign hanging from it proclaiming "Donations Welcome". Again, he probably would have wanted it that way...

After settling in, we decided to head out and see if we could turn up young Amos. We bought some trail rations and set out on foot for the Kellman woods. We made our way through the underbrush, pausing by the watering hole were we found the wolf corpses we'd hung up a month ago had long been cut down.

We continued the length of the stretch of woodland, until Yøgund unceremoniously discovered a shallow pit trap under a layer of leaves and scrub. A trio of spitting cobras lurked at the bottom, and they promptly started spitting their poison at him. Thankfully, his helmet visor protected him from the worst of the venom, and he strode forward to strike the serpents down, joined in the pit by Melchoir and Kashim.

Once the snakes were dead, we took stock of the situation and decided to lay a trap for the trappers. Somebody dug this pit, and pretty recently too from the look of it. We positioned Getz and Klint at the bottom of the pit to act as victims of the trap, while Elef took up a position of hiding nearby due to his natural halfling ability to vanish in the woods. The rest of us dug in under a layer of brush nearby, and laid in wait as the afternoon faded to night and the bugs crawled over us.

As darkness fell, a party of gnolls came loping cautiously out of the woods, brandishing spears and sniffing the air, attracted by the mock plaintive cries of our party's two thieves. As they came near the pit to investigate, Elef stole over to our position to warn us of what was happening, as being buried under branches we couldn't see.

Suddenly, Kashim burst form his hiding place and charged the gnolls, bellowing a battle cry and swinging his scimitar. He had hoped to shove the beasts into the pit, but they were alert and got out of his way, splitting their force of six into two groups of three. The dusky foreign warrior nearly toppled into the pit himself, save for braking his progress right at the lip.

Now, at this point something of Kashim's bravado had somehow infected the Deacon, as he leapt up and charged the gnolls as well. In this case, the wandering cleric braced his quarterstaff and managed to clothesline the mangy bastards into the pit. (Natural 20, baby!)

Now, this was awesome and all, but on the other hand it was probably a major tactical error, seeing as two of our own guys were down there, minding their own business and not expecting to be toppled upon by a trio of seven foot tall hyena headed goons, and then be stuck down there with them. Once the gnolls recovered their senses they started attacking their fellow pit occupants.

At this point Melchoir and Yøgund got up and charged the rest of the gnolls. The Deacon cast Hold Person on one of the ones down in the pit, while Elef cast Charm Person on one of them before the rest of our fighters closed. Both spells were successful, freezing one in his tracks, while the other became instant bestest buddies in the world with the halfling magician. Sadly, he only spoke gnoll, but Elef was able to convince him that his former fellows were a threat to him and that he should fight them. Apparently there was some bad blood between the gnolls that needed to be worked out, because our newly charmed ally attacked his former tribesmen viciously.

Speaking of vicious, Kashim decided to dive down into the pit to help the thieves, and managed to roll a massive critical with full damage, nearly bisecting one of the gnolls with his scimitar when he landed. Klint took some heavy damage from the desperate survivor before they managed to shut him down, which the Deacon was more than obliged to heal by lying on his belly by the pit rim and laying a hand on him. (Least I could do, after dumping the gnolls on 'em in the first place.)

Soon, we'd slain our foes, and put the Held one to the sword. The charmed one was completely obedient to Elef, as far as could be managed with the language barrier in place. There's slight danger in keeping him around, as he can wise up and snap out of it, but gnolls are intensely stupid creatures, and don't really have much chance of breaking out of a charm. So for now we've got a pretty heavy duty henchman, which is kind of like this:

Except the beast isn't muzzled, is armored and armed with a spear, and the guy with the metaphorical chain's only three and a half feet tall. Who says halflings can't be badass?

The next day we decided to make our way up to the gnoll settlement in the midst of Tritop hill, of the infamous battle with the ogre and cheiftain were we lost that first bit of Liam the elf. We figured the gnolls probably had Amos, if they'd begun hunting down in the Kellman woods. They are known to keep slaves, so there was a good chance we'd find him alive. Taking our turncoat gnoll with us, we headed up the hill.

When we got to the top, we decided to send Klint and Getz ahead to scout, but that plan soon went south as a bunch of gnolls loitering in the courtyard of the settlement spotted us, and raised an alarm. The party decided to stand and fight, as a total of nine gnollish warriors piled out of the huts, with a garishly feathered and masked gnoll shaman in tow.

Ut oh... Spellcasters are a great thing. Spellcasters on the other guy's side? Not so much...

We started sending as much missile fire toward the shaman as we could, hoping to take him out before he cast any spells, but we didn't manage to get any arrows into him. He cast Sleep, which I think caught Melchoir and Yøgund. Thankfully, they gnoll warriors were far enough away that we had time to kick our sleeping beauties awake before the battle was joined.

The Deacon and Elef both cast our own spells, and managed to freeze one with Hold Person and charm another gnoll to our side. A big, nasty scrum ensued, as Klint and Getz broke off around the flanks and tried to make a strike on the shaman. In the melee by the hut, they managed to get in an amazing number of backstab attempts, until eventually Klint managed to shank the gnoll wizard with his longsword, sending him to whatever spotty, carrion stinking hell the beast was overdue to arrive at.

Meanwhile, our newly charmed gnoll had fallen to the spears of his former comrades, while the Deacon rapidly burned through his allotment of prepared Cure Light Wounds spells, and was reading them from our backup scroll to keep our guys on their feet. Melchoir, I think, got a lungful of gnoll spear, but was breathing with 0 hp after the Deacon fixed him up. (It might of been a party member that got nailed, but I don't totally recall. I know I had to patch Yøgund up a little, in spite of his heavy duty armor class and agility. Gnolls are 2hd, and hit hard.)

After a long, bloody battle, we finally managed to take out the gnolls, with only one survivor taking to his heels after the pups and females who had scampered for the hills after the shaman went down. We'd won the day and conquered the gnoll lair, but it will be next week when we see what we'll find there, 'cos here's were we knocked off.

All told, a good session. Good to be back in action after last weeks' commerce, bartering, and politics. Thanks again to Paul and the rest of the 10d Gamers for a smashing time.