Night's Dark Terror Playthrough

 

This is my character as you can see I put a lot of work into this drawing

Ok I’m playing through Night’s Dark Terror online. Some people have characters with high ability scores. I somehow managed to roll nothing higher than a 10. I named my character Yutnib. She’s a cleric.

Session 1:

Anyway we start out the game in Karmeikos, probably. I don’t really remember but I am pretty sure and even though my character is lawful she has somehow found herself in the stocks. People are throwing food at her. Next to her is a thief. So I guess my character is kind of like Jesus Except there is only one thief and She’s not being crucified and she is a level 3 cleric and not the son of god.

This is what you look like when you have an 18 strength. Also I am just going to be stealing everyone's art

Anyway luckily, the guards are distracted by a play put on by a theater company that was called something like the “Fart Hole theater Company”. Not exactly but close enough. So we get freed by the rest of the party who buy into the idea that they would free criminals they don’t know from the stocks in broad daylight and then go on an adventure with them.

Also there is a guy that is willing to hire us right out of the stocks. He pays us 100gp each to go get some horses from a place called Sukiskyn. We get on a boat the next day. The boat is being rowed upstream. We try not to dwell on the labor conditions of the oarsmen. Luckily, we are distracted from the class disparity by a goblin attack.

They stop are boat with a chain across river and some sort of hastily constructed rock edifice (that part wasn’t entirely clear). Anyway we can neither go up the river nor drift back. One of the oarsmen is working for the goblins Yutnib hits him. He dies somehow later. The point is we were wrong to feeling sorry for the working class because they could all be secretly in league with goblins.

We repel the goblins after something to do with one of our party members crawling to shore on the chain and then coming back without doing anything.

The magic user is 3d

We make it to our destination, which is some person’s house. She is dead. We don’t find her but we find her bear. Yutnib feeds the bear. The thief finds the body of the person we were supposed to meet and mutilates the corpse. this angers the bear. Everyone fights the bear. I was rooting for the bear. IO the magic user casts web and traps the bear. We cut our comrades free and go to sleep.

Session 2:

This is Scrud Pud, team mascot

In session two we met Scrud Pud The Goblin and fed him bagels. We are in some fort and there are no horses because goblins took them. Scrud Pud says they are looking for an ancient scroll or something. So.. maybe the goblins think the horses have them?

There was also a long battle where the goblins were trying to kill us. They didn’t. Scrud Pud the goblin was very sad because the goblin leader was killed. That was our bad.

If no one else remembers we are going to have to ask the NPCs what we are supposed to be doing again. 
In session two we met Scrud Pud The Goblin and fed him bagels. We are in some fort and there are no horses because goblins took them. Scrud Pud says they are looking for an ancient scroll or something. So.. maybe the goblins think the horses have them?

There was also a long battle where the goblins were trying to kill us. They didn’t. Scrud Pud the goblin was very sad because the goblin leader was killed. That was our bad.

If no one else remembers we are going to have to ask the NPCs what we are supposed to be doing again. 

This is a more idealized rendition of Scrud Pud

Naked Goblins, Haunted Hired Men, and an Orphan That Pooped a Gem; Recap 1/31/2021

We return to our adventure with the group sifting through their young ward’s feces after she swallowed a potentially hazardous/magical red gem, which the group had found floating around a decaying corpse sitting on a throne. 

The orphans continued to be tied together to prevent them from running away and getting hurt. But they have been fed good meals and taken for walks outside of the tower, though within the walls of the grounds. 

Sven was nominated to use his hooves, as it seemed more sanitary, to go through the poop.

The gem was recovered, the team rejoiced, and set off for a visit to Xylarthan’s tower. The orphans joined, still attached to one another, for safety, and sat on Sven’s back.

As the adventurers travelled through the bar they again announced that they would be looking for their lost hired men. While also pointing out that the children were being safely cared for. Other patrons seemed suspicious and wary of the group.

Xylarthan did not know anything about the gems specifically outside of the fact that they were magical. He moved them around his head and showed the group that they floated around his head as well. 

He offered them 250 gold pieces per gem.

Ember took a gem to see if the gems would float for her as well. They did.

The group however still voted to sell the gems and allow Xylarthan to study them.

Xylarthan also expressed some serious concerned for the safety of the orphans. He offered 50 gold per orphan but was denied. The group is intent on training the children with a skill for adventuring. And may possibly need their assistance in the dungeon at some point.

When that was settled they returned to the dungeon to begin their search for a connection between the current dungeon and the section where the Mushroom people lived in hopes of connecting all of their current maps.

It was decided that it would be safer for the group, with the children on Sven’s back, to go down the spiral staircase in the old Goblin Battle room. It was determined the room was safe after Ember listened at the door and it appeared the living gargoyles had left the room. The group did find the body of Ernie, a former hired man, and Ember took his spear for “protection”.

They reappeared at the bottom of the stairs in the church room with the “butt plug” idol, which was also empty.

It didn’t take long to move through to the “Slug” room where the adventurers opted to go through the southern door across the water. They walked down the corridor until it turned off to the west and followed along that way, hoping to bypass the heaviest amounts of fungus and reach the far western areas previously unmapped. 

The hallway spilled out into a large room, too large to see all of the details but there was a large pool in the center, about 10 feet from each wall, and within the pool was 12 bathing, laughing, goblins. They were naked.

The group cringed a little and then skirted around the edge of the room, hoping to avoid being noticed. There was a wide corridor on the north wall that the adventurers aimed for but they did not escape the goblin’s notice. 

Things quickly escalated as the goblins started climbing out of the pool. Theodora stepped forward to cast sleep as they moved toward their weapons and managed to put 9 of the 12 to sleep. The team then fought the final remaining goblins. Ember hit one while the rest of the team moved forward. Theodora cast burning hands, killing the remaining goblin and burning the other two. They chose to flee.

The group did what they do best and went through other people’s possessions. The goblins had with them a small decorated chest. There was an old crank on the side. Inside of the chest was 3000 silver pieces, which were loaded into Sven’s saddle bags.

When the crank was turned the chest played a haunting melody, which no one recognized. It too was loaded up.

Journeying down the northern corridor the team came to a room where the water continued to flow. Continuing north they came to the passage that had been filled with an almost moving, slithering, fungus and turned to the east instead. This brought them to another turn and another corridor, closer to the Owl Bear’s nest. And then they stumbled upon their former hired men; Dingle, X, Y, and Z. They were processing some trauma and dealing with a massive amount of shit.

The group removed them from the dungeon as they had always stated that they would, fulfilling that promise. And in their guilt spent 750 gold (!!! WTF) on food and drinks, and I can only assume some kind of “entertainment” in hopes of placating the men and helping them feel somewhat better.

- Theodora

The Adventurers, the Orphans, and the Gems, Recap 1/24/21

 The Adventurers, the Orphans, and the Gems

The team spent the last week preparing for their upcoming adventure; reaching out to a local home for orphaned children and requesting to take in a child or two around the age of seven or eight. They also did a little shopping. 

They received two orphans; a boy and a girl, twins, named Pongo and Perdita. The teams fed them a quality filling meal and informed them that they would be learning the way of the adventurer. The twins seemed less interested than the group had hoped. They the group honestly wasn’t sure how long the twins would be around for. 

Leaving their strong hold the group ventured to the local tavern. It was discovered through this venture that no one had seen the hired men who had gone with them into the dungeon the week prior. The group had hoped that the men had found their own way out after disappearing over the edge of the underground stream.

They loudly announced to all listening, who would not make eye contact with them, that they intended to take their orphans into the dungeon for vocational training AND to find their former hired men who were missing. 

But first, they set off to meet with Xylarthan, traveling underneath the bar, through the dungeons, and into his tower. 

Xylarthan offered little information in regards to the grand cathedral of the dungeon or the broken vial the group had collected. He did tell them that the vial was very old. 

He had more information though about Grishknack, the supposed Vampire ruler of the now named Klargarsar. 

Grishknack (the vampire part was an unsubstantiated rumor so status unknown) was the ruler of the tower and the town before Raglam, when the town was known as Grishknack. He is believed to be dead, killed by Raglam and his followers, but it is possible that he only disappeared and is still somewhere, waiting.

The group, with some answers, promised to visit again soon, and slipped back into the dungeon. They made their way along the corridor to the fountain covered in angels, and remembering it’s healing powers for those of Lawful Good status, Sven, with the aid of Theodora filled a flask of the water to take with the party. They hoped it would help to heal Sven or the orphans if their was an incident or any sort.

Turning back around they followed the corridor back to the west and past the corridor to the tower. They walked through the circular room and came to the door at the other end, finding, of course, a corridor. 

The team opted to go south where the corridor swiftly (after 10 feet) turned off to the west and almost immediately were confronted with a “couple of dudes” which actually meant five kobolds, who were unhappy with company. They asked our adventurers for their treasure. The group played off the traditional, “We’re broke as a joke” routine. 

Finally they offered two of Embers apples, Sven explaining that they were magic, giving the consumer magically advanced strength. The Kobolds were intrigued. Theodora sweetened the pot with the offer of adding a dagger to the bounty; so they could cut the two apples and share them easier. 

The deal was struck. However the group had to turn around as the Kobolds were pissed when they began following them down the passage way.

And so they returned east and turned back to head north. And then west further down the corridor. Making what they would find out was a square. Before they discovered this though they entered the room in the center of the passages. The center held a pit of unknown depth. 

Ember was the only one interested in leaning over the edge and as she did a tentacle came out of the hole, grasping for her, thankfully missing. 

The party got out of theirs as fast as fucking possible as other tentacle began coming up to join their compatriot. The door was rapidly spiked closed.

Continuing south our adventurers found a door, once opened they realized they were back to the naturally hewed rock corridor that would lead them back to the three doomed room, which lead back to Nupo’s basement. 

So they turned around and set off east, then north, and followed the corridor until finally reaching the Tower magic sewage run off stream that they had been looking for.

Ember and Ves loaded onto the raft that the group had bought, brought, and dragged through the dungeon up until this point and off they went!

Sven, loaded up with Theodora and the orphan children, scared and crying after their short time in the dungeon, waited a moment longer.

As their raft rode the rapids of the sewage stream, Ves became dislodged, losing the lantern to the waters, and nearby drowning. Ember, who managed to stay on the raft attempted to help them, by using a grappling hook, managing to connect with the stone bridge above, and grab Ves before they disappeared over the edge that the hired men had been lost to the week before. 

At this time Sven and his passengers splashed over the edge and launched themselves, thanks to the Pegasus’ incredible strength, onto the banks. 

Theodora using her Infra-vision, was able to spot Ves and Ember gripping precariously to the rope and lit a torch, guiding Sven to save their friends. Sven, using his teeth, pulled their rope and the two adventurers to safety. They were wet and fairly pissed. 

The orphans were still fucking crying so Theodora attempted to calm them and fed them a snack.

The team opted to follow the path of their lost hired men, because they are good people who actually want to help, sometimes. And save their crumbling reputations. 

Through the west door of the slug room there was a a vestibule and then another room. Which, of course, had more fucking Kobolds, who took Sven a little too seriously when he asked if they had seen any dead people. It turned out, they WANTED to see dead people and the team would do. 

Ember was lanced by a spear. And the group escaped through the only other door on the north wall as the assholes cackled behind them.

The travelled along another corridor, damp, before being confronted by a fungus wall to the north, a fungus covered and possibly moving corridor to the west, and a door to the east.

They opted for the door.

Inside was a dedicated corpse in an ancient robe on a throne. Beside him were two hovering gems, a red and a green. Ember riffled his pockets. Theodora examined his hollow face.

The team, led by Ember, decided to take the gems and be prepared to run. The first was knocked from its position and picked up in a cloak. The second was grabbed by the orphan, Perdita, who refused to hand it over and swallowed it. 

The girl made a run for it. Ember threatened to kill her. Her brother all but bit off Theodora’s ear before she could stop him and fled. 

The girl was let go and the two were put to sleep by Theordora, Ember collected them, while still threatening to disembowel the girl. But instead they were hog-tied together and thrown over Sven’s back. The team was getting that fucking jewel back one way or another.

After that, they opted to just leave, and find out what the jewels were and maybe lock up the orphans for life. 

The Kobolds were gone, the group travelled back through the slug room, the north, and back to the well. Theodora levitated Sven up the passage as he held the rest of the party. They exited through Nupo’s basement. 

Nupo’s isn’t even surprised anymore. He almost just seems disappointed.

The orphans awoke. The group fed them on their straw bed. But nothing was over. They would get that jewel. And they were definitely going to need to speak to Xylarthan again.

- Theodora

I published QAnon Cyberpunk with Boomer Characteristics

I am republishing an article I put on medium this Morning.  I am also putting it up here because I haven't been working on anything else and I'm proud of it:

Cyberpunk with Boomer Characteristics

    With only a few more days until the inauguration of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., therе seems to be no more room for QAnon, no more cracks in the future of the consensus model of reality of the future for its ecstatic mental paroxysms to slip through, to feed off. A lot of people have consigned QAnon to the dustbin of history. I would love to join them. I also think QAnon is dying, but in the same way that Pizzagate died. There will be a reconstitution and a reformation.  QAnon is an aesthetic practice, and a ritualistic information processing methodology that can be easily transformed and reapplied. As others have pointed QAnon is also a LARP or some sort of augmented reality game. The purpose of this article is to nail down exactly what kind of LARP it is and to discuss what aspects are transferable. I can state categorically that QAnon is a Christian millennialist Shadowrun LARP. There, you can stop reading. Although, I will spend the rest of this screed explaining what that means and how it came about.

Millennialist Boomerism and Cyberpunk
    I am not going to trace the history of Qanon from Clancyesque surrealism to apocalyptic millennialist prophecy in any detail. Other people are much more coherent at that and have done masterful jobs showing the way that Anons imagine themselves to be playing spymaster. Those narratives and aesthetics gave birth to the movement and are responsible for some of its key plot points (i.e., Q is a government intelligence officer; the military is inherently good and the potential savior of the American people, and so on). I have a lot of nostalgia for this era and the almost baroque level of ornamentation heaped on to their bizarre extrapolations from the minutiae of Hillary Clinton’s life. This era focused on pictures of politicians who may or may not (but definitely are) wearing ankle monitors, strings of numbers that might be GPS data. The explanations and exegeses have ornate winding conspiratorial lyricism almost like an art nouveau vine (perhaps I was wrong to refer to the baroque; I think art nouveau is a better metaphor for their ramblings). These reveries were clearly in the security state thriller genre. With the Cold War gone and the War on Terror (somehow lacks the same appeal) however the paranoia was directed solely at domestic targets and internal political enemies.
    At this point in early QAnon the explicit narrative is pure security state thriller tropes. Q’s posts are descriptions of future covert state actions against Donald Trump’s political enemies. The difference is anonymous 4chan users and later 8chan users have taken the role of the security analysts.  It is this democratization of security work that begins to incorporate elements of Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk can be traces at least as far back as  Bruce Bethke’s story, Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk  constructs a dialectically opposed reality to the one found in Tom Clancy novels and Cold War saber rattling. The world of Cyberpunk is one where the old guard is out of touch and not highly competent operatives. The protagonists are teenagers who enjoy sowing chaos through computer hacking with no aim or ideology. They are seemingly motivated by a motiveless malignancy or a compulsion to delinquency. However, the idea of the renegade hacker has entered into the trope blender that is QAnon. The result is QAnon’s merger of the Right's fetishization of the strong father figure found in the statist fantasies of Tom Clancy with the Cyberpunk tropes of the 1980’s.
    Of course, QAnon is not the first movement to integrate the fantasy of the rogue computer hacker into the fantasy of the uber-competent undercover government operative. QAnon’s innovation is the refusal to integrate these two things into a coherent narrative. The Government is at once a bastion of good and  a satanic pedophile ring. Anons are simultaneously anti-government hackers and loyal patriots. We can listen to an individual Anon’s justifications for how these contradictions are resolved, but any individual Anon’s explanation or ‘head canon’ cannot be understood to be the official narrative. The resolutions to the contradiction are individual; it is only the contradictions that are universal. It is here that QAnon pushes itself into Phillip K. Dick territory. However, we cannot follow them there yet. First we must discuss how the praxis of QAnon is informed by their non-synthesis of statist spycraft fiction and  libertarian cyberpunk fiction.
    Ironically the plot of the short story, Cyberpunk, is of little use here. It is more instructive on the reality of the Qanon arc than its internal symbolism and praxis. It tells the story of a protagonist, who has contempt for adults seemingly unable understand all the sophisticated stuff that he can do on a computer, and ends when his dalliances on the computer are shown to be incapable of keeping him from being sent to military school. In the end the virtual world of cyberspace is no match for the coercive power of meat-space.

Surrealism in Rebellion and Bootlicking
    The QAnon aesthetic is much more in line with the early work of William Gibson. A Q drop has similar narrative contrivances to Neuromancer. The narrator has a way of making the read feel like an insider being addressed by another insider. It creates an intimacy based on the illusion of a shared lexicon and knowledge base, while teaching that lexicon and knowledge to the reader. It makes the reader feel smart and cool:

Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he’d been a cowboy a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He’d been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief he’d worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data (William Gibson, Neuromancer).

See, very cool. You feel like a hip insider being informed by another hip insider of the doings of third hip insider. Neuromancer creates a conceptual framework for playing around on the internet while pretending you are doing something important. It also establishes the main plot outline of QAnon. There are people, Anons, sometimes known as “bakers,” who take posts/“drops”/“crumbs” on 8chan, or earlier on 4chan, and interpret them in a way that tells the story of a secret government operation.
This process is analogous to what a ‘decker’ does in Neuromancer. There is a mission from a shadowy employer. The protagonist goes on a computer and does things on the internet that allow them to extract secret information. The secret information slowly paints a bigger picture of a reality that is only discoverable through further interaction with internet. The nature of the secret becomes increasingly bizarre until it is revealed that there is a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence pulling the strings and suggestions of extra-terrestrial involvement.
     The QAnon ‘consensual hallucination’ is that they are also engaged in this process of discovery at the behest of actors in the U.S. government. This is The LARP;  it feels like an ‘almost permanent adrenaline high.’ There is the ecstasy of decoding a post. There is the fear response from obsessing over cannibal pedophiles. There is the reassurance that there are good guys in control that comes from the more boomer-oriented, Clancyesque roots of the conspiracy theory. There is the feeling of superiority that comes from having secret knowledge, which is perhaps the uniting thread between QAnon's literary antecedents. I am sure I could go on, but the point is that these feelings coalesce into a kind of ecstasy.
    I said the LARP was a Shadowrun LARP because it does not just incorporate aspects of spycraft and cyberpunk; it is also fundamentally relies on a belief in the supernatural. Shadowrun is the roleplaying game that united these two things. In Shadowrun you could be a shaman or a hacker. People pretending to be Shaman’s and hackers had to work together to complete missions. QAnon is a movement that has room for a guy named Praying Medic and a guy that claims to be communicating with himself from the future via a quantum computer. Shadowrun pioneered that integration. QAnon has replaced the Shamanistic magic of Shadowrun with the divine magic of prayer. Other than that (and the absence of other races of humanoid from the core canon) the praxis of Anons follows a Shadowrun adventure: a the mysterious patron gives you a mission. Then you move to a location while shooting stuff. At the location, you log onto a computer and do computer hacker stuff. As you repeat this process, you uncover a larger conspiracy plot.
    Qanon has adopted and adapted this process with one notable exception.    Until recently, the part about going outside and committing crimes was downplayed. Anons were never told to do anything in the real world except perhaps buy merchandise and contribute to crowdfunding campaigns. In fact, they were encouraged to simply ”enjoy the show.” The job of the Anon was to bear witness to a secret war using investigative acumen and a computer. Anons are actually engaged in a mixture of a mixture of googling and free association. As the predictions of the Q and the Anons started to fail tension developed between Anon’s image of themselves as ‘independent researchers’ and the continued failure of their research to produce any results that coincided with objective reality.  This tension resolved itself by incorporating spiritualism. Once QAnon incorporated fantasy tropes, it became too compelling and fun to collapse. Like Shadowrun, it was a place where incongruous fantasies could coexist in a sort of mélange or potpourri. Anon’s were now engaged in spiritual warfare. Anons conclusions, like, “Hillary Clinton will be executed” or, “their will be mass arrests” began to take on the qualities of prophesies or supplications to a higher power. More and more you would see Anons say things like, “God is in control.” QAnon began to resemble a priesthood. The LARP became one were cyber priests prayed and spoke prophecy into being over Facebook and Twitter.

WWG1WGA and Mercerism
I am skipping over a lot of the whackier aspects of QAnon. The whackier parts-the clones and stuff- have roots in mental illness and Philip K. Dick. I know, the whole thing has its roots in mental illness. It’s a “schizoid embolism”, a “consensual hallucination.” I would never call it a cult; it’s not that organized. It is more of  a gnostic Christian practice. It is a real-world analog to Mercerism from, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but dumber. Just read this; let it wash over your mind:

The man, Wilbur Mercer, plodded ahead, and, as he clutched the handles, John Isidore gradually experienced a waning of the living room in which he stood; the dilapidated furniture and walls ebbed out and he ceased to experience them at all. He found himself, instead, as always before, entering into the landscape of drab hill, drab sky. And at the same time he no longer witnessed the climb of the elderly man. His own feet now scraped, sought purchase, among the familiar loose stones; he felt the same old painful, irregular roughness beneath his feet and once again smelled the acrid haze of the sky - not Earth's sky but that of some place alien, distant, and yet, by means of the empathy box, instantly available. He had crossed over in the usual perplexing fashion; physical merging - accompanied by mental and spiritual identification - with Wilbur Mercer had reoccurred. As it did for everyone who at this moment clutched the handles, either here on Earth or on one of the colony planets. He experienced them, the others, incorporated the babble of their thoughts, heard in his own brain the noise of their many individual existences. They - and he - cared about one thing; this fusion of their mentalities oriented their attention on the hill, the climb, the need to ascend. Step by step it evolved, so slowly as to be nearly imperceptible. But it was there. Higher, he thought as stones rattled downward under his feet. Today we are higher than yesterday, and tomorrow - he, the compound figure of Wilbur Mercer, glanced up to view the ascent ahead. Impossible to make out the end. Too far. But it would come (William K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

There, that’s QAnon.  “Where We Go One We Go All” is their motto. The purpose of the gematria, the praying, all of it is to achieve unity with a higher purpose. Not to win. Not to actually get the pedophiles. It is to join with people through this entity known as Q and bear witness to his deed through this arcane process of decoding these cryptic missives. Once you understand them you have in a way made yourself one with his consciousness and joined with him. There is a larger war, a nebulous spiritual war that occurs secretly behind the scenes. Only traces of it appear in our reality as codes in music videos or popular movies. Our reality is a veil, and behind that veil is Q and Trump and the white hats. Your job as an Anon is to bear witness and in bearing witness you meld with Q and Trump and all of the white hats. You also join with your fellow Anons into this one entity that exists to fight spiritual evil.
    This profoundly religious experience is not going to be debunked. It must be robbed of its transformative power. Once QAnon can no longer provide spiritual ecstasy, it will be replaced or reformed into something that can continue to provide that experience. Falling into QAnon belief is a process that begins with feeling alienated by where your country is headed, and then it provides you with comfort, excitement and intrigue. Finally, once you are hooked, it provides you with ecstatic religious experience. It is as intoxicating and nourishing as Mercerism is. It acknowledges the evil of the world without asking Anons to understand or truly confront it. Or as in, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, “A Mercerite sensed evil without understanding it. Put another way, a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever he saw fit.” This is what makes Mercerism and QAnon so resilient. The evil is nebulous. The shared reality is the reality of the experience of believing in QAnon. It is a form of Gnosticism.
    QAnon is world of intrigue and divinity that invites participation and shared world-building. It purports to give people, through prayer, the power to purge evil from the U.S. Government. This formula is compelling and not going anywhere. The new version of QAnon may take some time to constitute itself after Biden’s inauguration but it will be back if it ever even goes away.

1/17/2021 Summary - Sexy Long Beard and the Way to Level 3

 Sexy Long Beard and the Way to Level 3

Theodora, experiencing an epic hangover from a night at the tavern with Sven is pretty hungover and out of it for the first half hour of exploring and has almost no memory of what was said or went down. She knows that due to not having the Feather Fall spell the adventuring team opted to enter through Nupo’s basement. By the time she had really come to herself, processing a greasy breakfast and an ale, that the group were already in a corridor previously unexplored. There were three new hired men; X, Y, and Z. As well as “original” hired men; Adonis, Dinkle, and Ernie.

This was the corridor running parallel to the one just to the west where Ember had fallen through a trap door/hole. There was some confusion as to spacing and how this corridor fit into the dungeon they had previously mapped but things seemed to come together over time. 

There was a door into a further corridor and around this point Lorna Doone felt ill and had to return to the surface. She took with her the ghost of hired man Ernie, in hopes of helping them both at the infirmary. 

The rest of the party continued onward finding a door in the left wall where Ember heard a grinding sound which reminded the group of the gargoyles they had previously encountered, so they skipped the room and continued on. The corridor ultimately terminated in another door, which again the group pussed out on opening, instead choosing to try a corridor in the east wall.

However, as they turned, heading back, there was the sound of a small, barely intelligible voice following them.

Ember and Ves were down the corridor, heading east, as Sven and Theodora turned back to see a little, skinny man, wearing nothing but his own very long hair, behind them. He had long hair, and an exceptionally long beard. It covered private areas but little else. Both were understandably nervous so Sven turned on the Chainmail Chick charm. It worked. The man was enchanted.

He had clearly been in the dungeon for a very long time without human contact. But he agreed to join the group and lead them to the third level through the twisted maze of corridors, if he could ride upon Sven’s back. Theodora, understanding the need to get deeper in the dungeon and feeling compassion for the strangle little man, scooted back and made way. 

He claimed to no longer know or remember his name, as he had lived in the dungeon for so long, but Sven gifted him with the name “Sexy Long Beard” with his excessive charm.

Sexy Long Beard only remembered the vampire leader of Clargarsar, Grishknock. The group tried to explain that where was no vampire in the tour, but Sexy Long Beard could not comprehend this fact it seemed.

He was a strange little man but a good guide as the group moved through the dungeon. They took the corridor in the east wall, twisting with it, and eventually returning to the room with the spiral staircase, the gargoyles, and what was likely the dead body of Ernie, but no one looked long enough or hard enough to know.

Note: Sexy Long Beard explained that the Well was the fastest way to the third level of the dungeon, but AGAIN due to the lack of Feather Fall is was a difficult route to take with a large Pegasus. So the group chose what was a longer route.

They travelled through the north door in the spiral staircase room, narrowly escaping the gargoyles thanks to a quickly slammed door and the Hold Portal spell and travelled along a winding dirt and stone passage way that twisted and turned, clearly hewn from he very stone of the dungeon. Theodora recognized the passage and tried to find and use whatever maps and memories she had of the space from earlier adventuring.

The group continued on with shocking little intervention. There were a few Kobolds distracted by apples. They twist and turned, Sexy Long Beard cackling about the corridors which lead into corridors. Until they came to an area, which was clearly under the old tower. Beneath it sewage ran, not traditional sewage, more like magic run off sewage. 

Sexy Long Beard was the first to throw himself in and be whisked away. The rest of the group followed behind with some serious trepidation. They were dragged along on the least fun water ride of their life eventually falling into a quickly running stream. Sven and Theodora leapt from the waters, following the surprisingly lithe Sexy Long Beard. Ves and Ember jumped out after them. The hired men had far more issues.

Adonis, Dinkle, X, and Y, were swept away, unable to escape the torrent of water and washed over another waterfall and out of view, only their screams to be heard. Z was the only one to escape. He immediately wished to look for his fellows but was stopped buy the group and convinced to stay with them.

Theodora immediately recognized the room as she had previously been part of a battle against a giant slug in that room and found an idol. In fact the bridge one of her compatriots had built with magic was still there, across the stream.

The team chose to cross said bridge and go through the southward door.

Behind the door was a corridor (surprise). And while the party occasionally got distracted, Sexy Long Beard reminded them that the third level was slow close, just to the south. So they continued and after like 140 feet they entered a thirty by thirty room with a door on the opposite wall. Through the door was an intersection, leading west, east and south, and again they went south. 

This FINALLY lead to a stairwell that meandered, twisting and turning, until depositing the group on the third level!

They found themselves in a room, massive and cavernous, similar to a church of some sort. The room was so large that Sven, with Theodora on his back, could fly above.

There was an apse with a pit and offering bowl. There was artwork of people falling from heaven and an inscription to do with a child, tithing, and offering, and submitting. It reminded Theodora of the inscription on the massive elf sculpture to do with glory and sacrifice. But alas the group realized they had no children to sacrifice, terrifying the hired man, and moved to explore more. The hired man at this time ran for his life...


(It’s so hard to find good help.)

As the did this Ember offered a jewel - nothing. Some blood -nada. 

The south corridor, which was huge, had niches with cherub statues. Heads with Wings. And their faces were disgusted.

So the group travelled East. The found a room on the south wall, it smelled like death and decay. In the center was a person in a robe but they were mummified, decayed, but clutched a vellum scroll, it was a map of the forests above group. The team opted to save it for later.


They exited the room from the opposite side and entered another massive cathedral like room. The apse in this one was more football shaved and held a Dias with a body upon it. The body was only bones and armor at that point and looked as though it had been dropped from an immense height. Sven and Theodora fly upward but determined it could not have come from even the ceiling to cause such damage. It was a mystery. 

Ember rifled his pockets.

Gold (625 pieces) and 4 gems were recovered and taken. At this time it was decided to head back and due to their companion Lorna Doone being in the infirmary, the group opted to return to the surface to meet backup with her rather than spend the night in the small room of death.

Sexy Long Beard had at this point vanished. The group briefly mourned his loss. Especially Theodora who had found the old coot amusing and helpful. Even while others questioned him. She hoped they would find him (alive) again soon.

The return journey was unremarkable thanks to their handy maps. The group returned through Nupo’s basement and vowed to have the Feather Fall spell for the following day of adventuring for a quick return to the third level!

The Cat People That Weren’t Cat People At All

In today’s pre-Christmas holiday adventure, our team of intrepid characters set out once again in hopes of finding the third level of the dungeon. Spoiler. They were once again thwarted. 

They team - Theodora, Ember, Svenasus the Pegasus, Ves, and Lorna Doone travelled to the local tavern to hire some fighters. They paid 20 gold pieces and were able to hire six men who would each receive half a share. The party agreed to this knowing first, they had been pulling very little lately, and second, most of these guys were probably doomed to die grisly deaths due to the party’s callous behavior.

The fighters, named A, B, C, D, E, and F (promised names only if they survived and returned on a second adventure), were wary but set off with the team to enter the dungeon through the mansion basement entrance. 

Svenasus was again dropped first and with the help of Ves’ feather fall spell hit the ground slightly less hard than last time (there were some weight miscalculation issues) and only took 6 points of damage.

The rest of the party followed on ropes.

The team noticed that a previously spiked door, keeping the naked hairless humanoid cat people locked up, were missing and the group collectively shuddered. They immediately moved to follow their path from last week into the large room, down the hall, and to the crossroad. Back to the even larger room with the elvin statue that had come to life previously.

The statue was waiting for them. But the team was prepared. Ves cast Dispel Magic stopping the statue in it’s place, still repeating the same words from last time. Lorna Coone set to smashing it to pieces, for the valuable metals inside, with her mace. 

The group opened the second chest from last week and a secret door opened on the west wall. Lorna stayed behind with F (holding the door), as well as C and E to guard/help her. The rest of the group went through the secret door. To the north were wall paintings representing the good and heavenly and to the south were the bad and earthly. Ember removed the daggers on the wall with a green stone (the opposite having red stones) from the south, earthly side.

The party then returned to the larger room and the chest. Placing the daggers inside did nothing. Nor did it reveal anything else on the statues pedestal. So they moved onto the pit. The pit seemed very deep so the group sent two hired men down 100 feet of rope, held by Svenasus. It wasn’t long enough so another 100 feet were added and one made went to what seemed to be the bottom where he started screaming. He was pulled up and was physically fine but emotionally broken and screaming about ghosts.

The party didn’t have time to examine this further as F told them that the naked cat people had just entered the room. They didn’t look as much like cats as the party thought but they were hairless and eyeless and creepy. 

Theodora used her Fireball scroll and burned them all to death. And the party decided to go back to the cat room from the beginning and see if there was an idle there.

Lorna had finished collecting all of the precious metals and they were loaded into Sven’s saddle bags. And the party departed. 

Opening the door to the “cat” room hallway presented the group with four more “cat” people, some large and some small. A fight ensued. There was spear jabbing, daggers, and Burning Hands. They were all vanquished. They party went to the room and moved across it to find another door. On the other side was a corridor and a room filled with snakes. And the party, knowing their time was just about done, turned back and returned to the shaft. 

Theodora cast Levitate on Svenasus, as every one grabbed a hold of him, and the party was transported up and to the mansion again...

No richer, and with no more idols...

- Theodora

 Return to the Mansion Entrance - 12/13/20

The intrepid group of adventurers, this time Ves, Theodora, and Svenasus the Pegasus, opted to venture down the shaft through an abandoned, ruined mansion into the dungeon. Svenasus had to just drop down, sustaining some damage. The others climbed down with rope.

Theodora had some familiarity with the entrance, haven taken in before, but the rest of the party was new to that part of the dungeon.

They group entered a 30 by 30 foot room with doors to the north, south, and west. To the north, Theodora remembered looting so the group went south. There they discovered a room filled with naked scary humanoids as well as goblin like creatures who frightened the group badly enough that they turned, spiking the door three times and the following door was spiked as well. The eyes will haunt them.

And so they ventured west. In that room, a large space that seemed silent and empty, there were Bugbears. The adventures tried to escape through a door on the south wall as Theodora burned the monsters with Burning Hands. This mostly singed and angered them. But the party escaped, even after almost leaving Theodora behind to her fate (she took 4 hit points of damage).

The Bugbears gave chase and Theodora used Push to hold the door closed. The group moved down the corridor and to the west, to the east they saw the Bugbears who followed them but then fell back. The monsters did not follow them to the large bronze doors emblazoned with snakes. Theodora remembered as snake monster behind those doors who demnbaded to be fed. The group turned away. 

They circled around and ended up back in the main room, heading back into the Bugbear room and headed north this time. They saw a door but then heard the same Bugbears behind them. This time they fought.

The Bugbears inflicted damage on the party and then Theodoras put them to sleep and the group killed them as they slept. Taking what little money they had.

They went through a door in the west wall and entered another hallway. At the intersection they could go south but this appeared to head back to the snake room. Or go west but this path headed upwards. Or north which was a graduated down tunnel, so they took this path. 

The group ended up in a very large room, they could not make out all of it. There were two large chests along the east wall. One which demanded glory, the other sacrifice. Further along the north wall was a slab, a table, which had cracked and lead down into a pit. And in front of it was a large elvish statue figure with a sword through its chest. 

Ves casted protection from evil on theirself and opened the glory trunk, it was empty, but as they did this, the statue came to life, pulling the sword from its chest. It was 10 feet tall. The group chose to run for it and come back with more people to fight another’s day, exited the way they came, and levitated to the surface.

Ves and Theodora visited Xylarthan and Ves learned the Feather Fall spell for when they party returns.

And now it is time to rest.

- Theodora the Gnome