The Bloody Marches - Session Five

Two adventurers and their hirelings reentered the FLOODED FORGE, eager to finish the fumigation and claim loot of the highest craftdwarfship.

• Burned Leaves, Elf 2.
• Heiwae Mann, Thief 5.
• Sven, Orc 1.
• Varg, Dwarf 2.

With Heiwae's Infravision spell still active, the whole party could see in the dark and so decided to forgo torches. They struck up a conversation with the Cyclorc sentries, learning about an "evil rock" that screamed at the greenmen in a language they didn't recognise. They also mentioned their tribe's giant war rat was marooned to the North, surrounded in a flooded chamber by headless skeletons.

Alan Lee

The party ignored both rumors and set course for a different area of the dungeon. Sven muttered that one of his friends, Jeem, had wandered into these rooms and not come back. Heiwae soon spotted a likely culprit, a suspiciously warm blob clinging to the ceiling. He shot it with an arrow, inciting the pinkish blob to launch itself onto his leg. The thief beat a hasty retreat as the sentient hamburger patty began dissolving his flesh.

Sven tried to hack it off, woefully misssing due to a total lack of depth perception. Heiwae set his fireproof armour ablaze to burn the slime away, but it just hid below the waterline. Varg solved the problem by scooping the thief up and pitching him onto dry land, letting the burning oil scorch the protoplasm. The axedwarf finished the job by scraping the ooze free and chopping it to bits. After Heiwae quaffed a healing potion, the party returned to the room the Pink Slime had laired in and found a steel door spiked shut. Varg knocked the piton free as Heiwae listened at the door, hearing noises like a dozen knives scraping against one another.

Spooked, the party ignored the door and moved towards a manager's office, filled with lead tablet work orders, stone furniture and a very dead Cyclorc. Suspicious, Varg crept forward and identified another Pink Slime hiding inside Jeem's chest cavity. After Sven muttered a prayer, party neutralised the protoplasm with a firebomb and ransacked the room, finding a solid andesite chest below the water. Varg and Sven heaved it out, reasoning it probably contained the fortress' fiscal reserves.

Heiwae checked the chest for traps and noticed an anomaly in the stonework. He'd seen the result of Stone-To-Mud before, on ancient ruins undermined in forgotten wars. The stone's texture belied a constant use of such a spell. But unable to find a trap, nor even a lock, he heaved the heavy lid open. 

The chest immediately transmuted itself to black mud, dragging in Heiwae's arms like quicksand. Then it reverted to andesite, fusing his limbs into the box. Varg guffawed at the thief's predicament, before admitting he had no idea how to disarm it. At least he hadn't triggered it underwater and drowned.

Heiwae shuffled his hands around, confirming the presence of coins and magic items. Varg and Sven decided to just lift the entire thing, along with the thief, and cart it to the Cyclorc encampment. They made it back without incident and Varg set to work ramming his new steel spike into the lid's seam and hammering away until the seal broke. The enchantment went haywire, transmuting the chest into a pile of black mud and freeing Heiwae, who began scooping up coins, a potion bottle decorated with a wound dwarf and a pair of ruby lenses. Trying on the latter, he accidentally blasted Burned Leaves with an unknown effect that he thankfully saved against. The thief apologetically put the magic glasses away as Varg claimed the steel potion flask, shoving it in his pack.

Feeling confident, the adventurers decided to explore the "evil rock" room the Cyclorcs' warned them about. It appeared empty, barring an engraved support pillar holding up a worryingly unstable ceiling. Spotting a steel door at the room's far end, Varg hugged the wall and moved towards it. He noted the pillar's carvings of Ophidian-Dwarf alliances had been defiled with pictograms of giant hammers smacking the race traitors on the head.

Then it spoke - a baritone voice ordering the Dwarf to restore its former glory lest it collapse the room on both of them. It couldn't stand living as an ugly failure for another century. Varg produced a hammer and his shiny new piton and promised he'd try. He promptly mangled the chiselwork by knocking a huge chunk from the pillar. He grumbled it wasn't his fault that his father raised him as a carpenter.

The Caryatid Column grew arms and a giant axe, taking savage swings at the Dwarf as the pair exchanged slurs and racial epithets. Varg fled the room, the golem briefly shouting insults from the threshold before ducking out of sight, fearing ranged attacks from the halfman's companions.

Godwin chose that moment to enter the dungeon, staring in confusion at Varg who continued to hurl barbs at the animated pillar. After getting a briefing from Heiwae Mann, the knight decided to lead the party towards the room they'd heard mysterious noises behind. The gang stacked up on the door and Varg kicked it in, throwing in a torch for Godwin's benefit. The guttering brand illuminated a workshop filled with shattered canopic jars, inanimate columns and a shiny anvil. Nervous about traps, the party sent Sven in as a sacrificial lamb, but the greenman reported nothing but a pile of treasure.

The adventurers carefully searched the room, finding a small fortune in silver fittings, gold hammers and cabochons. Varg sucked air through his teeth as he identified the anvil as solid adamantium. It was worth a king's ransom, but the party had no way of getting it out of the dungeon; they couldn't cut it into manageable chunks, and they'd promised the Cyclorcs they could have any legendary tools. As they debated, Godwin scooped up the torch and glanced at the distant ceiling, unable to make out the roof in the darkness. He threw the brand upwards. Something stared back at him.

CC1

Pandemonium struck as a pair of four-armed albino snakes dropped from the ceiling, vat-grown Serpentmen soldiers sold to the Dwarves in ages past. They laid about with steel sickleswords, maiming Godwin and Burned Leaves with a flurry of strikes. Both sides dealt serious damage, striking out with magic swords, knapped blades, arrowheads and axe strikes. Sven dealt the killing blow on the first Whitewinder, ramming his chert spear into its chest until something burst. Varg finished off the second moments before it performed a coup de grâce on Burned, lopping off limbs as he apologised to his ancestors for saving a knife-ear.

Exhausted from a near death experience, half the party scooped up the portable loot and beat a hasty retreat out of the dungeon, desperate for clerical healing back at the Brood Snatcher. 

Varg and Heiwae stuck around for a bit longer, peaking through a steel door to the North of the workshop. They found a flooded room occupied by a giant metal snake smashing its head against a barrier of divine energy. It screeched about wanting to taste its master's flesh before noticing the adventurers. It told them to fuck off or it'd eat them and their shiny weapons. Suitably intimidated, the pair rushed to catch up with the rest of the party.