After a few weeks of well-earned downtime in Fallowfields, three adventurers mounted their freshly purchased horses and set course for the underground temple.
- Gavel, Level 2 Fighter.
- Godwin the Green, Level 2 Fighter.
- Heiwae Mann, Level 2 Thief.
With Haisam busy, the party needed a spellcaster to operate the Staff of Opening. Godwin contracted a magically-inclined retainer, a theological litigator from the Tree of Life.
- Burned Leaves. Level 1 Elf.
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| AD&D Dungeon Explorers |
There were signs of recent activity - footprints in the sand, discarded building materials and the acrid smell of something burning. Someone had taken up occupancy in the dungeon.
With the water now unpolluted, the party chose to ford the underground river. Here, the fighters noted an elevated section of the cave perfect for rallying a counterattack against besiegers. Sure enough, they found a hidden sallyport after a brief search.
Before they entered the serpentman crawlspace (slitherspace?), Burned Leaves whispered a warning to snuff the torches. The party obliged and soon heard the clinking of chainmail and murmur of muted conversations in Dwarven. The noise was coming from the hole leading into the flooded baptismal chamber - the party's usual entrance to the temple.
Once the sound receded, the elf explained what his infravision had seen. Two armoured halfmen taking measurements of the jagged hole with reels of retractable metal tape. The party cursed - the Deadlifters were still in the dungeon and looking to fortify the entrances.
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| U.S. Pat. No. 79,965 |
After a brief discussion, it was decided that the Dwarves were a problem for later. For now, they party would bypass them via the sallyport. Movement was arduous in the cramped tunnel, the adventurers having to awkwardly crouch-walk until they came to an intersection.
One tunnel terminated into a normal-sized room. The other option was a more recent construction - the burrow of some subterranean creature. Based on the spoor scattered throughout the tunnel, Heiwae Mann suggested it was giant rats. Though, judging by the feces unnatural rainbow shimmer, these weren't your normal Rodents of Unusual Size.
The party ignored the rat tunnels and moved into the adjoining room - the temple's barracks. With no use for beds, the Serpentmen had furnished the room with sleeping mats and hammocks. Bones were piled on the floor, covered in rat shit and defaced with bite marks.
One skeleton caught the eye of Heiwae Mann. It wore ornate gauntlets made from dozens of interlocking bronze pieces - untouched by the ravages of time.
Unfortunately for the thief, a horde of albino rats burst from the bone pile when he tried to loot the gloves. The rodents were disgusting creatures - congenitally blind and covered in pustules of alchemical fluid. One masticated Gavel's exposed face while another clambered onto Godwin and clawed the knight's neck.
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| AD&D Fiend Folio |
Shaking off his surprise, Heiwae Mann routed the monstrosities with a well-aimed flask of burning oil onto. The rodents were finished off with some enthusiastic stomping. Though Gavel had caught something from the rat bite, the symptoms weren't immediately deleterious. He decided to keep dungeoneering.
The gauntlets they'd recovered turned out to be enchanted, granting the wearer increased reflexes. Heiwae Mann decided to gift them to Godwin, hoping to offset the knight's natural clumsiness. (This wasn't really an act of charity by the thief. He was already the pinnacle of human dexterity, the gloves couldn't do anything for him.)
As the party looted the room, they noticed another crawlspace to the north filled by the rearends of two particularly large fungal zombies. The party pincushioned their exposed butts with arrows, killing one of the undead before it could even turn around.
By the time the sole survivor had extricated itself from the tunnel, Burned Leaves had charged forward and smote it with his war gavel (having no religious compunctions about killing undead).
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| Bloater, from The Last Of Us |
Like their previous adversaries, these zombies were marked with Dwarven tattoos - the Deadlifters must've left them here as a trap. Clearing away the corpses, the party entered a normal-sized corridor and headed west - coming across a closed bronze door. Listening at its surface, Heiwae Mann was alarmed to hear an ominous beeping noise from the other side.
Fearful of what lay beyond, the adventurers stacked up behind Gavel's magic shield and ordered Burned Leaves to be ready with Hold Portal in case things went awry.
Their caution was unfounded. The beeping was coming from a stone sculpture in the centre of an otherwise empty room. The basalt slab was an interesting sight - the snakes had carved it into a topographical map of the surrounding area (including sections of the Underdark). The stone map was covered in floating quartz crystals that all glowed various colours - white, blue, yellow, green. One even pulsed a dull red (in sync with the intermittent beeping noise).
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| By Steve M. Potter |
After some investigation, the party discerned the room's purpose. The map had a scrying enchantment - the colour-coded crystals each represented a different designation of settlement.
- White - unaligned. Fallowfields was represented by a such a crystal, as were the outposts of other colonial powers established nearby.
- Blue - allies. All located in the Underdark. Given the Dwarven coins in the dungeon, these were probably the underground holds of the halfmen.
- Yellow - defunct Serpentmen installations. One particularly bright crystal represented the dungeon itself. Others littered the Underdark and surrounding area.
- Green - operational Serpentmen installations. Only a handful were visible, with the nearest across a mountain range and deep in a dune sea.
- Red - unknown threat. This pulsing crystal was the only one that occasionally moved. The adventurers hypothesised it was a dragon or demonic incursion.
The map was an invaluable tactical resource, thought it would be difficult to extract any actionable intel (read: other dungeons to plunder) without the help of a cartographer. The party resolved to keep their discovery to themselves, until they could exploit it for profit.
Continuing onwards, they came to another bronze door. After listening to it, Burned Leaves claimed he felt an immense void on the other side - probably a passage to the Underdark. They entered onto a raised series of crenellated ramparts overlooking a massive vertical shaft.
A bronze gondola lift, enchanted with permanent Floating Discs, levitated over the chasm's eastern edge. This "undervator" was probably the Deadlifter's access point for the dungeon.
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| Mammoth Cave's "Bottomless Pit" |
A pair of bronze tripods were positioned on opposite ends of the ramparts. One was trashed, a mess of torn metal and shattered crystal, but another was intact - an ornate rod shaped like a snake gagging on a chunk of quartz.
Godwin detached the artefact, began fiddling with it and was rewarded with a brilliant flash of light that nearly burned his retinas out. It was an idiot-proofed Wand of Light, created so that lumpen Serpentmen could illuminate the Underdark entrance.As the party examined their newest magic item, Burned Leaves told Godwin he'd seen an iron door on the south-western side of the shaft. After another whispered debate, the party descended from the ramparts and walked south, moving along the shortest route across the chasm.
The walkway groaned. Then buckled. Then crumbled away. The adventurers fell into the abyss.
- Heiwae Mann, an unparalleled climber, quickly secured himself to the cave wall.
- Burned Leaves, spared from the trap by his rearguard position, grabbed Godwin with his mancatcher. Straining his muscles, the elf hauled his employer to safety.
- Gavel managed to throw a rope to Heiwae Mann, who deftly wound it around a nearby outcropping. As the sellsword tumbled into the dark, the rope went taught and arrested his fall. Gritting his teeth, the fighter painfully climbed his way to safety.
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| Clint Eastwood, in The Eiger Sanction |
Once the party had recovered from their near-death experience, Heiwae Mann mentioned he'd seen wooden supports falling into the chasm along with the rubble. The adventurers deduced that *someone* must have intentionally undermined the path as a trap for any passerbys.
Fucking Dwarves.
Heading around the (much longer) northern path, they safely arrived at the iron door. It was a curious construction, a vertical shutter hammered into the rockface. After an ineffectual lockpicking attempt from Heiwae Mann, Godwin ordered his retainer to cast Knock.
With a loud clang, the door opened to the unoccupied campsite of the Deadlifters. Spider silk bedrolls, sacks of iron rations and other paraphernalia littered the floor in neat piles.
The adventurers looted potions, flasks of sweet beer and a pair of pressurised metal buckets. Unable to read Dwarven, they couldn't identify the items (despite Godwin volunteering to take sip tests of the potions and liquor). Loot secured, the party took spiteful satisfaction in defiling the Deadlifter's rations and throwing their bedrolls into the Underdark.
With packs laden with stolen supplies, and Gavel's symptoms worsening, the adventurers decided to turn back. They exfilled from the dungeon without incident, though they had to tie the diseased fighter to his horse prevent him falling off.
After arriving in Fallowfields, Gavel decided to fork over the exorbitant cost for clerical healing rather than test his luck with an alchemical plague. The clerics of Fat Sun took his money, melted some of it down and plastered his black-veined skin with layers of gold leaf.
After a lengthy prayer, the metal painfully sucked away the pestilence from the mercenary's flesh. The priests peeled off blackened gold and pronounced Gavel cured.
Meanwhile, Godwin and Heiwae paid a wizard to identify their plundered goods.
- Unsurprisingly, the glowing-red potions were drinkable Cure Light Wounds.
- The liquor was Beer of Beard Growth. It thickened facial hair into a biological HEPA filter, used by the Deadlifters to avoid breathing in their own bioweapons.
- The pressurised buckets contained dormant fungal bombs. If opened, the things would inflate and begin spraying zombifying spores everywhere.
The magical consumables were kept for later use. Thankfully, despite the wizard's offer to purchase them, the adventurers were smart enough to burn the spore bombs in a vacant field.
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