IV middle: Through the Dungeon Report
General Summary
"CRAWLING THROUGH THE INEXPLICABLE DUNGEON" recap Our Adventurers picked up mid-combat: Mark and Skayma seeking superior ground with cool, calm, professional detachment and taking out creepy eggs as they went, whilst Elkhazel displaced a pile of huge, hatching spider eggs and Klaus raided the spot for the silvery cloth. Vrmsk quickly came up with a plan to wedge the egg-room door shut with his harpoon once all Adventurers were evacuated, working against the clock as strange crystalline spiders hatched from the eggs and the webs in the room sprang to life. Webs took the shape of half-sized hunters and they began stalking the spiders with lassos to capture them and daggers to kill them. Skayma tried to hail the little guys but one took offense and attacked him: the hunter ended up skewering himself on Skayma's sword, Klaus & Elkhazel cleared the room, Vrmsk shut the door and Orond took a torch to a webling trying to crawl under the door. No more trouble from that quarter! A few spiders escaped and are creeping about the ceiling, glowing gently. Our Adventurers moved on. They'd left two doors unopened -- one in the large chamber in which they'd begun the adventure and one in the corridor that had led to the spider room. Proximity trumps! and the Mark opened the corridor door onto a room with nothing in it except yet another door on the far side. Orond was suspicious. He suggested that Vrmsk check for traps. Sure enough, the floor was a trap which would have dumped intrepid explorers 10 feet or so into murky water below. On the inside of the door Vrmsk located a lever that revealed the pit, leaving a narrow ledge of stone around the edge of the room that was just wide enough for the nimble Vrmsk, lucky Orond and elven Elkhazel to use for a path across the room. Orond suspected that the other adventurers might not be able to cross as easily and so, when the far door opened onto a wide space filled with stone benches, the three who'd crossed flipped a bench over and with Skayma's help managed to get it across the chasm as a secure path. Inside the huge room Our Adventurers found rows of stone benches; tapestries and stained glass windows with scenes of hunters chasing deer; a high altar and a pulpit; and some doors out. Klaus climbed the steps to the altar and promptly transformed into a deer. Which didn't hurt his intelligence and gave some serious buffs to his physical stats. No sooner had Klaus become a handsome, antlered stag than a stained-glass hunter came to life and, leaping from the window into the room, took aim at Klaus and shot a glass arrow wide of the mark. Mark and Skayma moved to attack the hunter: a well-placed arrow took it down. Orond was so impressed with Klaus' new look that he climbed up too and got himself both re-skinned as a deer and wounded by a glass arrow before Skayma shot the glass hunter who had sprung to life at Orond's transformation. Around this time the party thought they'd move out. Beyond the cathedral: a bedroom/study space. Elkhazel read from a book of lullabies and the next person she spoke to -- Vrmsk -- fell dead asleep and couldn't be roused for several minutes. There was a bookcase in the study with mundane books on hunting, various wildlife and wilderness skills and philosophy -- Saji and Elkhazel collected some volumes on natural philosophy. Meanwhile, Klaus had gotten a bit bored and tried to get to the book on top of the pulpit; with help he knocked it to the ground and it turned out to be filled with pictures of hunts: elegant hunts with lords and ladies, stealthy hunts where primitive peoples stalked their prey, and great dragons diving from dark skies to hunt phosphorescent sea creatures. Back in the study: the group explored the room but found nothing of interest beyond a few pens & some ink bottles and paper ... and then they spotted a hidden door. Beyond the hidden door: a space with running water, an empty basin, two jugs and a puzzle that Orond and Skayma worked to solve, netting them what seems to be an inexhaustible (if dingy-looking) bottle of clean water. Klaus thought to himself that it couldn't hurt -- much -- to try the water and see if it ameliorated his deer-disorder. It did! Klaus is a person again. Orond, who sees himself not as deer-diseased but as alternatively embodied, declined to drink the restorative water. Round about now Our Adventurers noticed that they were really, really tired of this weird stony space so at the next corridor they decided on a bold new strategy: open all the doors at once! Four doors = five explorers deployed to open them: Elkhazel burst into some sort of meeting space with barrels at one end; Klaus found a door to a long corridor with another door off the end; Mark (with Skayma close behind) found himself facing four coffins (one ajar) and a horrid stench; and Vrmsk was confronted with two looming bookcases. What next? Who can tell???
Rewards Granted
Elkhazel: books: how to track prey in a range of environments; camouflage for hunters; deer reference; lullaby/sleep book with "Celtic rune" cover(if you read it, the next d3 people to whom you speak will fall asleep unless resistant DC20 will save giggle book with red leather cover. + pens, paper Klaus: art book with pictures of hunt? in The Real, will be images of war. Mark: Orond: Saji:books about: dragons; birds of prey; wolves. Skayma:inexhaustible if dingy water flagon Vrmsk:books: one of maps and one leather-bound blank book;
Character(s) interacted with
web creatures crystal spiders
Related Reports
IV beginning: Into the Dungeon
