# (Cydra) The Final City



## the Jester (Jul 17, 2018)

The triple walls yet stand. Despite everything, Fandelose endures. 

The Sword Empire of Thrush is no more. The cities of humanity are crumbling ruins. No music nor laughter sounds in the elven tree-kingdoms. The clangor of the dwarven thanedoms has gone silent.

It all began with the victory of Chaos over Law at the end of the Great War of Ethics. That was the death knell of civilization, for what is civilization but the imposition of order on the chaotic dance of nature?

Those heroes who won the Great War of Ethics put two of their own on thrones and built a great empire. For thousands of years they held off the fall, but when they themselves were gone, what they had built could not last. A great alliance formed- the Six-Fingered Hand, which united orcs, gnolls, kobolds, lizardfolk, goblinoids, and ogres into a tremendous force under the leadership of a cabal of mighty death knights led by Arawn the Black. The armies of the Hand swept through land after land, burning and slaying everything. 

But one city stood, championed by a group of unlikely heroes. Fandelose, with her triple walls, was the bastion upon which the Six-Fingered Hand would break. A five-year siege of the city, at last broken by the heroes, was followed by a desperate attack on Arawn himself. And when fell Arawn, so fell the Hand itself. Without his leadership, the disparate forces united by his will collapsed into in-fighting, turning on each other. Inevitably, the Six-Fingered Hand dissolved.

And Fandelose stood, alone- or nearly so- in the whole world. 

Constantly beset by remnant humanoid tribes, the city has no real outlying towns, for people outside the walls are prey for the monsters and evil humanoids that lurk in the countryside. There is no trade by road nor river, for there is no one to trade with. To feed itself, the city has converted the former estates of the nobility into huge fields of rice paddies, intercut with canals, but one bad year could kill the entire city. 

This is Fandelose, soot-smudged city lit by firestone, last outpost of civilization, an unsustainable aberration in a world overcome by chaos, a point of light in the darkness. 

This is Fandelose, the final city. 

The air is always smoky here. It is, generally speaking, not wood that burns; it is firestone, mined by the dwarves who dwell in the Black Gorge just outside the city. The smoke hangs over every part of the city- the Upper District, where the farmers live amongst the rice fields, struggling to be heard by the city's political apparatus and increasingly enserfed; the Bronze District, now home to the city's upper crust and the wealthier businesses; and the Lower District, comprising the majority of the city, where the poor dwell crammed together in urban filth

It is four decades, more or less, after the fall of civilization. During the crisis period, it had been ruled by General Argus, and ever since, its government has swung back and forth between military dictatorship and civilian representative democracy. But when the civilian Bronze Council rules, it inevitably endangers the city by allowing too much freedom. The farmers cannot be allowed to leave, and those that do- and attempt to set up an outlying town, such as Red Bank- are inevitably captured or killed by monsters or members of the races of the Hand. For a time, one of the Heroes of Fandelose- Heimall Heinrickson- served as the city's military dictator, now titled the Argos; but his time is past. After another few swings of the pendulum, Heimall's son Otto has ascended. 

The old heroes are largely retired or out of sight. It is a time for new heroes to rise.


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## the Jester (Jul 25, 2018)

Let us start with a sign, or rather, the story of a sign. As with every story, it changes with each telling, and with the passage of time, the edges grow blurry. But nonetheless, this is the story.

Start with a pair of dragonborn, one of them drunk enough to stagger, and a dark-skinned dwarf between them. The dwarf comes from a small, ragged group of dwarven survivors that dwell in the Black Gorge, just south of the city. The gorge also hosts a tribe of orcs. These orcs were not part of the Six-Fingered Hand. Both the dwarves and orcs are nominally allies of the city. 

The dwarf if named Dzedz Orcslayer*, and he hates orcs with a passion. Many of his people do. His clan- Clan Orcslayer- is a major faction in the area. They are the ones amongst the dwarves who would prefer (and sometimes work) to see the orcs exterminated. 

Periodically, Clan Orcslayer gains the political advantage in the dwarven hold. This results in a war between the dwarves and the orcs, which generally ends in a dwarven victory, but a Pyrrhic one. And then it takes a century for the dwarves to recover their lost population, while the orcs do so in a decade and a half. This is one of many unsustainable conditions in the area, at least from the perspective of Clan Orcslayer.

The three halt for a minute as the drunker of the dragonborn cries out, “It's time for Mad Max to pack a bowl of hempflower! My friends, smoke with me!”

Mad Max Damage Hashish, as this dragonborn is improbably known, wears a suit of chain mail over his own silver scales. The long haft of some heavy weapon hangs across his back. He drunkenly unslings his backpack and extracts a glass pipe from it, ignoring the disapproving looks of the people passing by on the street. He wobbles, obviously well into his evening's drinking, as he pulls his pouch of hempflower out and mashes a bud into the pipe.

The other two crowd in as Mad Max strikes a torch, then uses it to light the pipe, taking an enormous hit before passing it to the other dragonborn. 

The two of them aren't related. The second, considerably less drunk, dragonborn is green-scaled and looming, with a presence that Mad Max can't match. He also wears heavy armor and bears a maul blung across his back. He draws deep on the pipe as well, then passes it to Dzedz.

“Thank you, Carl Hungus,” Dzedz says, before taking a big puff himself.

“There!” cries Mad Max, pointing at a sign nearby. 

The sign depicts and angry flightless bird, saddled but riderless, its wings raised in an aggressive posture and one talon raised, as if it were about to strike. This is the Angry Kocho Tavern, or at least, this is its sign. But this is not the sign that this story is about.

The three of them bustle into the tavern and seek out the proprietor, who doesn't want any trouble. Neither, the trio declames, do they. In fact, they want to help.

“We want to perform at your tavern!” Mad Max produces a lute with a flourish and strums it. Carl Hungus shakes and taps a tambourine.  
.
“And I will use my magic to create a light show and some fireworks!” Dzedz adds. 

The proprietor is not convinced. This does not deter the trio. With some trepidation, because these fellows are clearly armed and dangerous, the proprietor doesn't physically stop them, which- based on their level of intoxication and how little they're listening to what he says- is probably the only way to prevent this performance.

And at first things seem fine. Even the dubious must admit that, drunk or not, Mad Max can sing. As for the other dragonborn, well, he can mostly keep a simple beat. 

It's the dwarven mage's enthusiastic contribution that goes awry. 

First a spray of colors, which is itself a fine accent to an otherwise fairly entertaining, if impromptu, performance; and then a wave of flames, which sets a table alight. In turn, this causes several very strong drinks to spill, two of which likewise catch fire, and quick as that, the hems of a couple of robes are on fire. The people wearing those robes, in their consternation, accidentally catch a curtain and another bystander, and then starts the panic. 

It's remarkable how quickly a situation can turn when you light it on fire. While the customers of the Angry Kocho scream and run, the proprietor immediately sets to work putting out the fire, shouting orders to his subordinates. There are also two adventurers in the place- well, two _other_ adventurers- and they set to helping. Together, these kind people manage to save the Angry Kocho and contain the cost of the damages to several hundred marks.  

The two dragonborn and the dwarf are nowhere to be seen in the aftermath, of course. 

“I knew I should have posted this a long time ago,” the proprietor gripes, as he nails a large sign just outside of the door. 

And that's the story of how the Angry Kocho Bar got its “NO DRAGONBORN” sign.



*”Dzedz” is pronounced, approximately, “Zed”. But if the next word starts with a vowel, the final Z is pronounced, so Dzedz's name sounds like “Zed”, but his full name sounds like “Zed Zorcslayer”.


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## the Jester (Jul 25, 2018)

If we're going to be talking about the city, we may as well be comfortable. Come, there is a place we can sit and drink bean juice while I tell you these tales. 

Bean juice? I'm surprised you haven't had it. It has been all the rage in the city for the last few years. 

Bean juice is a dark brown juice served hot, almost like a tea. Yes, it is actually made from beans, but not ones that you would recognize. They are hard. I understand you roast them and grind them up before steeping them in hot water. Personally, I recommend adding some goat's milk to it, to lesson the bitterness. Others put honey in it to sweeten it. 

Bean juice is a strange luxury. The city doesn't grow the beans, and as far as I know, they don't grow wild outside the city, either. It's a holdover from the imperial days. You see, Fandlose was a trading hub between wherever the beans were produced and wherever they were going. When the war happened, the Six-Fingered Hand disrupted trade, but not all at once. The long and the short of it is, for a time, the beans made it into Fandelose- which didn't have a taste for them- but not past it, to their final point of sale. So, for several decades, the beans sat unused in storage. There were a few attempts to do something commercial with them, but the folk of the city just didn't seem to have a taste for them. Or maybe the problem was that nobody had figured out how to brew the juice properly yet. Whatever, it was only a few years ago that the juice began to really take hold in the city. Now there are nearly as many cafes as bars.

Anyway, it's kind of funny. This place we're at- the Bean Juice Cafe- has been the site of many a gathering that turned out to be the start of an adventure. That's one reason why I brought you here. In fact, remember that story I told you about the sign? Well, this is where those three would-be entertainers met. I understand it was at that table right over there that Mad Max approached Carl Hungus and offered to buy his fellow dragonborn a cup of bean juice. And it was at that table over there- no, not that one, the one to the left, by the little shrine- it was there that, at that very same moment, Dzedz Orcslayer was talking to Lazarus. Lazarus was a half-elven scholar affiliated with the Cerulean Tower. He knew Dzedz's master from some academic work they had done together, and had recently sent a message to him asking for help. In return, Dzedz's master sent Dzedz to see what Lazarus needed. 

And that's how the first of the current crop of adventurers first got together. It was Lazarus, and his missing friend, that pointed Carl Hungus, Mad Max, and Dzedz to the megadungeon beneath Marble Hall. 

So sit back, sip your bean juice, and open your ears to me. Let me tell you another story....


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## the Jester (Jul 26, 2018)

“You must be Tindul's apprentice,” says Lazarus. He's a half-elf, gray at the temples but still black on top. He is dressed as a scholar, in blue, and was reading a book while he waited for Dzedz's arrival.

“I'm Dzedz.” The dwarf extends a callused hand to the scholar, and they clasp forearms. “My master said you needed some help, and he sent me.” 

“Ah, excellent! Let me get you a bean juice.” He catches the eye of the human behind the counter and raises two fingers. The man hurries over with a pair of steaming mugs. Lazarus smiles and nods, pressing a pair of marks into the man's hand. 

“That's an expensive drink,” Dzedz remarks, taking a sip. “Thanks.” 

“It's kind of an acquired taste, I admit, but it has grown on me over the last year or so.”

Possibly due the fact that it's mid-afternoon, the place doesn't have much custom at the moment. For a few moments, the two sit there sipping their drinks, enjoying the relative quiet- only a boisterous pair of dragonborn are disturbing the serene scene. 

Then, Lazarus gets to the point. “One of my colleagues is missing.” He looks pained. “A wizardess. One of the only ones in the city.”

“And you want me to help find her?”

“If you can. Her name is Mileen.”

“Do you know her last whereabouts?”

“She was investigating Marble Hall.”

“You mean the megadungeon.”

Lazarus nods. 

Marble Hall, properly speaking, is long gone. All that remains is the foundation, and a few crumbling walls. Centuries ago, the dwarves dug a small dungeon underneath the ruins, and broke into an existing- and much larger- dungeon. The place is fairly dangerous, but occasionally, adventurers attempt to delve it, which is why the dwarves maintain a guard on it: to extract a toll from passing adventurers while simultaneously guarding against monsters intruding into the dwarf-works.

“Huh,” grunts Dzedz. “Well, if I can find her, I will.”

“You definitely shouldn't try to go without some protection. From what I understand, the megadungeon is both quite large and very dangerous.”

“Did you say megadungeon?” one of the dragonborn shouts from the other side of the room.

“All right,” Dzedz says, looking the two dragonborn over. “I may have have an idea on that score.” 

With that, he clasps forearms with Lazarus one more time, then stands up. 

“A round for everybody!” calls the silver dragonborn.

***

The three of them hit it off instantly. Truth to tell, Dzedz isn't in a hurry to plumb the depths of a megadungeon; this Mileen is probably either fine or already dead anyway. So, instead of going to the famed triple gates of the city, which lead southward, where the Black Gorge (and the megadungeon in question) lies, the party's first adventure takes them out of the city to the north. 

“There's this guy,” Carl Hungus says, “the Hacker. He's a bandit. I have a line on where he might be hiding out.”

“Is there a reward for him or something?” asks Mad Max.

“No,” Hungus says, “but he's a bandit. I'm sure he'll have treasure.” 

“Does he have, like, a band of brigands that follows him?” 

“Probably a few.”

“Who does he prey on?” Mad Max cries. “It's madness!” He pulls out his pipe and mashes a large bud of hempflower into it. His voice is fraught. He takes a long pull from his waterskin, and his lips come away smelling of rice wine.

“Probably people going to Red Bank and back,” Hungus answers. 

Red Bank is a struggling thorp about twelve miles north of Fandelose, in the mountains. Created by Fandelosian expatriates, it is roundly condemned by the Argos as being indefensible and vulnerable. Indeed, periodically, monsters, humanoids, or giants raid the place, killing, burning, and taking people away as food or slaves. Still, especially given the situation with the vote franchise, people- especially farmers who would rather be anything else- still run to it. Supply runs back and forth to and from Fandelose are common, following the river north along the steep hillsides. 

There is no road, but there is a path that travelers must follow. Some of the farmers who would be anything else choose, rather than life in a tiny collection of huts, struggling to survive on fish and game, a life of banditry. And those supply runs are easy prey for bandits. 

Hungus knows all about this. 

The Hacker is notorious in circles sufficiently well-acquainted with bandits. He is vicious. He is cruel. He is knows for savagely dismembering people without even rendering them unconscious first. He laughs while they watch themselves bleed to death. He likes to take slaves and dismember their friends in front of them so that they know what kind of master he's going to be.

Hungus figures that the Hacker is a bad enough of a dude that nobody will mind if the dragonborn enslaves him. And if the bandits have slaves or prisoners, who knows? Perhaps those folk will just never be rescued. 

Maybe they'll just get a new master.


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## the Jester (Jul 28, 2018)

Fandelose is famous for its impregnibility. Its triple walls, and the triple gates, are iconic enough to figure on the city's flag. And yet, the walls don't fully enclose the city. The geography to the north has always been considered sufficient to ward off attacks, and it has almost always proven to be true (the Six-Fingered Hand's attempts on the rice fields during the Fall excepted, and even that was repelled). 

North, the hills rise, jagged and uneven. Boulders dot them, rough scrub grows on them (though fewer trees every year, as more and more are harvested for the city's needs), footing is uneven, unreliable, and steep. There are no real paths or trails that lead to the north edge of the city from the plains to the south; and the river, increasingly known simply as the Fandelose River, cuts a jagged, deep, fast-flowing gash through the mountains. 

Red Bank, some twelve miles north of the city, is connected to the city only by the most tenuous trails that roughly parallel the river. As our three, ahem, protagonists- certainly not heroes- trudge through the high, grasping grasses, they spy a goat herder with his charges and exchange greetings. The herder is wary of them; Carl Hungus lingers a little to see if he'll turn his back on the three adventurers, but he doesn't. 

“I'm telling you, the Army is where it's at.” The bastard child of a ramble and a rant is born from Mad Max as they journey along. He keeps on talking, increasingly drunkenly as the day progresses. He constantly smokes bowls of hempflower, more than either of his companions can keep up with. “You should consider joining up. I'm in the Red Battlet, myself. We're the heavy infantry. You know, I really like to fight. Hopefully we find this Hacker guy soon.”

“You said you have an idea where he might be, Hungus?” asks Dzedz. 

“There are a couple of old bandit hideouts I've, uh, heard of,” the green dragonborn replies. “We're getting fairly close to the first.”

Suddenly an arrow shoots from the brush and catches Dzedz by surprise, thunking into his groin. The dwarf is turning at the moment it hits, and as the motion exacerbates the terrible wound, he screams and collapses. 

Goblins erupt from the brush. More arrows shoot out from the tall grass, but miss the two dragonborn.

“Oh no!” cries Mad Max. “This is madness!!”

Hungus draws forth a maul and meets the goblin charge. In a single blow, he caves in the first one's chest. The other two that are charging pull up short and slash at him with notched, rusty scimitars. Both deflect off of his hauberk. 

Max leans down and pours a _potion of healing_ down Dzedz's throat. “Good thing I bought this!” he cries, then springs up and pulls his own maul out. “Maul brothers!” he roars, challenging the goblins. 

An arrow hits him from the brush. Max curses. 

Dzedz struggles upright, pronouncing weird arcane syllables, making strange gestures. An glimmering orb appears in his hand, and then shoots out. It hits one of the goblins and explodes. The goblin drops.

The two maul-wielding dragonborn strike down the two standing scimitar-wielding goblins, then rush the bushes. Dzedz hobbles after them. “Aagh!” he shouts, shaking one leg. Something blood-covered and grisly falls out of the bottom of his pants. “They took my manhood!”

There are four more goblins in the brush, and they try to fall back and hide. But the enraged dwarf won't have it. He fires off bolts of flaming arcane energy and drops two, while each of the dragonborn strikes down another. 

“Aw, we should have taken one alive, as a slave,” says Hungus. “Or maybe even more than one.”

“Screw that!” Dzedz yells. “They cut off my-” He chokes up, scooping up his lost body part. 

“Ooh, the root and the stones,” Max notes. “I'm sorry.”

“Still, a slave or two...”

“The Hand races deserve nothing but death,” Mad Max declares. “But maybe slavery is okay, too. I don't know.”

“I need to sit down,” says Dzedz.

***

“I don't see what good it will do to turn back,” argues Hungus.

“Dude, he just got unmanned!”

“And?”

“Maybe someone can help! A cleric or something...”

Carl Hungus laughs harshly. “There hasn't been a healer capable of that kind of stuff in Fandelose since the Fall! At least, not that I know of.”

“Like you know every cleric in town.” 

“I think everyone would know if anyone could perform that kind of magic. For all I know, powerful magic has been lost with the Fall.”

“This is weird,” says Dzedz. He's looting the bodies of the goblins, which yield a few meager copper and silver coins. (At least it's real money and not those damned fake coins the city is using now.) “Look at this.” 

The other two walk over to where the dwarf has knelt down. He is holding the mouth of one of the corpses open. The goblin's tongue is white and fuzzy, covered in some kind of fungus.

“Ew,” says Hungus.

“Madness!” crows Mad Max. He pulls out his maul. “Stand back!” 

“Wait a minute-” Dzedz starts, then leaps back out of the way as Mad Max brings his maul down, smashing the head. “Hold on!” the dwarf barks. “We might be able to learn something here!”

“Learn something? Like what? They're goblins.”

“Even so.”

Carl Hungus leans in and murmurs, “Humor him. He did just suffer a... catastrophic loss.”

***

August afternoon slowly transforms into August evening. The oppressive heat subsides somewhat, but remains enervating. The hillsides to the west begin to fall into shadow.

“Up there.” Hungus points at a nearby hill with a wide, flat top dotted with large boulders. “There's great cover and a great view of potential victims on the way to Red Bank. Or so I hear.”

The three of them ascend, moving with care. 

The single bandit on guard is half-asleep, and before he knows what has happened, he is unconscious and bleeding on the ground. 

The party creeps to the edge of the small camp at the top of the hill. There are three bandits around a fire, talking in low tones and passing a skin of wine back and forth. 

They don't know what's happening. In only a moment, two of them are dead, and the final one throws down his weapons, crying, “I surrender! Don't hurt me!”

Carl Hungus steps to the fore. “Are you guys working with the Hacker?”

“No.”

Hungus shifts his grip on his maul. “Do you know anything about him?”

“I- I heard a rumor about where he's camped, but I don't know if it's true.”

“Why don't you just tell me, and let me decide what to think.”

“Bandit's Rook. I heard he's at Bandit's Rook.”

“Hmmm.”

“You know where that is, Hungus?” asks Dzedz.

“Yeah. It's a little further north.” 

“I want to go back to the city first. I want to see if I can get my injury repaired somehow.”

Hungus looks dubious. “We can try.”

“Damn right, we're going to try.” Dzedz grits his teeth. “I might even have to go on a quest.”

“As for you...” Hungus glares at the prisoner. 

“I helped you! I told you what I know!”

“What's your name?”

“Benthum.”

“All right, Benthum,” Hungus declares, beaming. “You're now my slave.”

“Here,” Mad Max says, and gives Benthum a mark. The new-made slave stares at it dumbly. A mark is not an insignificant amount of money.

Staring at Mad Max, Hungus says, “I'm not sure you get how this slave thing works.”


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## the Jester (Jul 28, 2018)

Of course, I left out the bit about the idol.

They found it on the goblins, a strange, crude, rough-carved idol, made of some soft. Black-and-green mottled stone. It made them uneasy to touch it, and with good reason. 

When, after leaving Benthum manacled in Carl Hungus' apartment, the three went to find a a place to play for their evenings' drinks (after all, neither goblins nor bandits had had much in the way of coin on them), Hungus for some reason brought the small idol along. When things went so wrong, practically unnoticed in the smoke and flames and panic, an evil spirit rose from the idol. Even if only for a moment, it strove to drain the life from those around it. 

But in the moment, everyone involved had had too many other things to deal worth to do much more than stave off its attacks and watch it vanish back within the idol.

***

“Should we go to a moneychanger?” Mad Max asks.

Dzedz sneers. 

The coinage situation is... a little weird. The city has officially replaced the old imperial currency with their new money, which is made mostly of brass, excepting the highest value coins. The dwarves of Black Gorge scoff at and won't accept it, but it is now illegal to have unofficial currency in the city. By law, the party is obligated to take those silver and copper pieces to a banker of moneychanger and have them turned into guineas and pence. Naturally, the person doing the changing takes a cut of the value- 3%, to be precise. Of course, he or she has to be licensed by the Bankers' Guild; not just anyone can get in on what the dwarves disparagingly refer to as “the money scam”. 

Get caught with illegal currency by the White Battlet, and it will be confiscated. Try to pay for something with it, and the merchant is legally obligated to turn you in, though some will instead wink and nod and palm the coin. However, the White Battlet sends people around out of uniform to try to get them to do just that. The penalties for accepting imperial currency are harsh and expensive in a city where most people are already teetering on the edge of insolvency. 

Word is that Red Bank doesn't use coins at all- a frighteningly uncivilized approach to trade. But then, what does one buy in a community of a few shacks and a beer hall? When one donates one's time and work to his or her neighbors out of necessity, asking only the same in return, everyone shares the food and drink around a communal fire in the evening. You can't spend coins if there are no merchants or stores, and money is meaningless with nothing to buy. 

“We better,” says Mad Max. “We don't want to lose our money.” He is drunk enough that he's weaving on his feet. Though their performance sobered him up a little bit, he has been hard at work drinking from his wineskin (now pitifully light) to compensate. 

***

After changing their coins, the trio also changes their chosen drinking establishment. After all, the Angry Kocho no longer welcomes them. At the new place they choose, they have a chance meeting with another pair of adventurers, a halfling woman named Shelby and a human man named Kovian. The two explain that they are a part of the faction called the Goblin Killers. They're dedicated to exterminating the races of the Six-Fingered Hand- goblinsoids, lizardfolk, orcs, gnolls, ogres, and kobolds. Unlike most of the other factions that defend the city, the Goblin Killers are prone to wander far afield, searching for infestations of the hated evil humanoids in the wilds surrounding the city.

Dzedz finds himself more than sympathetic to their view. After all, his clan (and faction) wants nothing more than to be rid of all the damned orcs in the Black Gorge. _Perhaps,_ he thinks, _we can work together on that someday._ But what he says is, “Do you guys know anyone who can reattach lost body parts?”

No. No, they don't. 

***

“No, I don't,” Lazarus replies. “I'm sorry. Did... did it happen while you were searching for Mileen?”

“More or less,” Dzedz equivocates. 

“Well, I'm very sorry.”

***

Oh yeah, Mileen. Dzedz tells the other two that he's actually supposed to be looking for someone. “She was investigating the megadungeon.”

“Megadungeon!” exclaims Mad Max. “Sounds like madness!” And he packs another bowl of hempflower. “I'm in! What do you say, Carl?”

“Sure, I just need to drop some food off for Benthum first.”

***

Benthum, it turns out, is concerned for his wife. His story, as best our heroes can put it together (for Benthum isn't a good storyteller, no sir), is that he was only acting as a bandit under duress. He, as well as several of the other bandits that the party earlier slew, were pressed into service by the head bandit of their crew by means of holding their families hostage. 

“Great, more slaves!” exclaims Hungus. 

“Just save her, please,” Benthum pleads. “Just bring her back to me.”

“We will,” Hungus lies. “Don't worry about a thing.” 

“They hold them to the north, north of Red Bank.”

“Sure, okay, no problem.”

***

Instead, our heroes head south. 

The city's great triple gates are always well-manned, which, on reflection, seems a little silly, what with the Breach and all. 

The Breach is a section of the city's defensive walls that has collapsed. Not only that, at least one attempt at rebuilding it failed, leaving a gaping hole that any attackers can rush through. This means that Fandelose has a fatal chink in its armor. This is yet another reason why the city is desperate. For whatever reason, the Artificers' Guild has proven unable to effect repairs, and whenever a large tribe of Hand folk comes into the area, it takes hundreds of soldiers to properly guard it against attack. It means that, each year or so, when the Scarlet Fist- a large hobgoblin remnant army- comes to the city, Fandelose must pay tribute or suffer a grievous assault. 

Nonetheless, our heroes pass outside the gates, Mad Max stopping to chat with those of his fellow soldiers who are on duty. 

Then it's outside with the three of them. 

The elevated roadway leading to the gates descends towards the plains to the south. Ragged, simple huts cling to the outer wall and are clustered to either side. These buildings are inevitably evacuated when the Scarlet Fist or a similar group comes into the area; they cannot be defended. There are therefore no businesses or temples or fancy homes. It's simply not safe for them. 

Our heroes, such as they are, follow the roadway south for a few hundred yards before the gorge opens up to their right. They are above the shallow end of it; it deepens as it runs to the west, where dwarven tunnels are hewn from the surrounding stone. The orcs are somewhere around the middle of the gorge. 

Marble Hall, or its remains, and the megadungeon beneath it, are at the near end. From the top, the party can see four dwarves standing guard over the entryway. A narrow trail cut into the face of the cliff allows an easy descent into the gorge, after which Dzedz leads the two dragonborn to the dwarves.

“Hey, Dzedz,” one of them calls. 

“Gormund,” the wizard nods back.

“You taking these two in?”

“Yep.”

“You know about the fees?”

“Not precisely.” 

“Down those stairs,” the dwarf jerks a thumb at the ruined foundation, “you'll be in the dwarf-works down there. At the point at which it breaks into the megadungeon, you'll each need to pay a silver piece to pass. And you have a pay a gold piece to come back in to the dwarf-works.”

“Understood.” 

“Do you guys have gold?” asks Hungus. “Will they take marks?”

The dwarf coughs out a laugh. “We only take _money,_ not stupid city fake coins.”

Nonplussed, the party realizes that they don't have the sort of money it will take to come back out of the place. After an animated discussion, the dwarf who has been speaking to them- Gormund- makes Dzedz an offer. 

“Listen, cousin, I know another way in. A secret way. But, uh...” He holds his hand out expectantly, and the party presses their few precious silver pieces into his palm. Despite looking slightly disappointed, he leads them down the gorge a ways, before taking them into one of the many small caves that pock its sides. “Here.” He indicates a 3' diameter hole, almost perfectly circular, bored into the rock. “Crawl down this and it will take you into the dungeon. But I'm not sure exactly where.”

The three adventurers eye the hole dubiously. 

“Why don't you go first?” Mad Max suggests to the dwarf. 

“Me? I'm not going down there at all. I'm on duty.” 

“I don't know if I trust this,” Max states. “I really think you should go first and prove it's safe.”

“I never said it was safe,” the dwarf snaps. “You're going into a dungeon. It's almost certainly not safe, and I have a job to do.”

“I don't know if we should go down there...”

“You guys do what you want,” says Gormund. “But I've shown you what you paid me to show you.” And with that, he marches back out into the gorge.

“We can trust him,” Dzedz assures the dragonborn. “He's my cousin. And he's right; this isn't going to be safe no matter what.”

“I'll take the lead,” offers Carl Hungus.

Thus begins the first foray of many that the new heroes of Fandelose will make into the megadungeon beneath Marble Hall.


----------



## the Jester (Jul 30, 2018)

The hole is almost perfectly smooth. Dzedz says, “This is probably a thoqqua hole.”

“What's a thoqqua?” asks Mad Max.

“It's a worm that burns its way through the earth and stone. They tend to wander the underworld, creating new passages.”

“Is this even going to reach the megadungeon?”

Dzedz grunts. “My cousin said it does. I trust him.”

On their hands and knees, the three crawl through the passageway. It heads in an almost straight line for ten yards before bending downward at a shallow angle. It then switches directions several times over the course of its several hundred yard length before finally breaking into a cave. 

Carl Hungus is in the lead. As he pokes his head out and raises a torch, he can see that it is a natural cavern. He crawls forth and stands up, followed by Mad Max and, finally, Dzedz. 

“Listen,” says Mad Max. “Do you hear that? Madness!”

Pausing, the others strain to pick out what he's talking about: distant gibbering, seemingly from many voices at once. 

“Hm,” grunts Dzedz. “Sounds like a lot of 'em...”

“You know,” Hungus says, “we don't even have a healer.”

The three stand, listening for a moment.

“Sounds like they're getting closer,” Hungus remarks.

“I wonder how deep we are?” Dzedz muses. “I'm pretty sure we're deeper than the first level.”

“Guys, I think we should get out of here,” Mad Max exclaims. “That's the sound of madness!”

All things considered, the others agree, and a moment later, they're retreating up the thoqqua hole. 

“We need to find a healer,” Carl Hungus states. “Then we can come try this.” 

“Aren't you supposed to be looking for someone down here?” Mad Max asks. 

“No, that's me.” Dzedz scowls. “Yeah, I guess we need to come back.”

“Also, I need some money,” Hungus says. “I have a slave to feed.”

***

There is an intersection in the city- a hard intersection. The intersection of Bronze Avenue and Soot Road. The territories of the two largest gangs in the city, the Bronze Tigers and the Coal-Faced Bastards, sometimes rub up against each other here. There are often fights, some restricted to fists and feet while others grow more serious. This corner has been the site of many a crime over the years. 

One such crime was the mugging, when he was but a youth, of Flint Sureshot. Flint was just a halfling boy, still learning his songs and how to play his mother's mandolin, when he passed through this intersection. He was shoved from behind, laughter echoing around him. Face down into a muddy puddle he fell. When he rose, glaring, he saw a group of four Tigers, standing arrogantly over him. They beat him, mocked him, and broke his mother's mandolin. 

He was just a boy. There was no way for him to fight back. 

Now, Flint is fully grown (though still well under four feet in height), and he is just another resident of the Lower District. When he has to go through the intersection of Bronze and Soot, he usually keeps his head down and hurries through, barely looking at anyone around. But recently, this has changed. As a result of his dabbling in a number of exotic types of smoking herbs, he has become quite the hempflower afficionado. He does not have a regular supplier. This has meant that he has to seek out a dealer each time he wishes to feed his habit. And that has, on this fateful day, led both him and us back to that same intersection.

He has seen some of these rough-looking kids around. A lot of them have marked themselves with stripes, whether drawn on their faces or the backs of their arms, indicating that they owe allegiance to the Bronze Tigers. This isn't something that makes Flint especially happy, but the Coal-Faced Bastards are more likely to be violent, so despite his history with the Tigers, it could be worse. 

The halfling sidles up to a group of young toughs. Their conversation- seemingly a competition over who can make the most unlikely boast about his or her sexual conquests- skips a beat as they notice him, but doesn't halt. Instead, one of the arrogant youths detaches himself from their clique and meanders over toward Flint.

“You need something?” the Bronze Tiger challenges.

“I was looking for a little hempflower.”

“I can help you with that, if I like the color of your money. I can help you with other stuff, too. Goof balls, nose candy, dzur...”

“Just hempflower for me,” Flint says, “at least for now.”

“How much you want?” 

“I don't know...” Flint pulls a handful of marks out of his purse. 

The Bronze Tiger's eyes widen. “You got some good money on you.” He swipes it from the halfling. “Hold on.” With that, he jogs away, heading west, deeper into Tiger territory.

_Did I just get ripped off?_ wonders Flint.

The other Bronze Tigers keep up their loud braggadocios, ignoring him, for about ten minutes. There's still no sign of the gangster who took his money, and by now, he's pretty sure he's just been robbed, when finally one of the talkers strolls over to him, this one with a wide girthed half-elf.

“You need something?”

Annoyed, Flint snaps, “No thanks, I think I've gotten enough from you guys!”

“Oh, yeah?” The half-elf cocks an eyebrow, and the other Tigers turn at Flint's raised voice and swagger toward him. “How so?”

“Your friend was supposed to go get me some hempflower, but instead, I think he took my money and ran.”

The gangsters laugh. “Poor guy,” sneers the half-elf. “Here, you got a pipe? I'll pack you a bowl.”

_This is not going well,_ thinks Flint, as the gangsters close in around him. 

***

Dzedz, Mad Max, and Carl Hungus stumble upon the unconscious halfling about an hour later. He is laying in the street, eyes swollen almost shut, blood covering his face. His purse is next to him, emptied of coin.

“Wow, that sucks,” says Mad Max.

“Let's help him,” Dzedz says, lifting the small form and draping him over one of the dwarf's shoulders. “Come on, let's get him cleaned up.”

And that is how the trio finds their first healer.


----------



## the Jester (Aug 1, 2018)

“That was satisfying.” Flint grins. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Carl Hungus replies. “Those Bronze Tigers never even knew what hit them.”

The halfling smirks. Even though he hasn't recovered the fancy pipe the Tigers stole when they mugged him, his newfound companion Max seems happy to keep packing bowls of his own. The hempflower doesn't heal his wounds, but it allows him to more easily ignore them. 

Besides, he has the power of music on his side, and that _can_ heal all wounds, given time. 

The five of them (Benthum included) stroll out of the city's gates, nodding to Max's soldier buddies as they pass, and head into the gorge again, waving at the dwarves guarding the main entrance to the megadungeon before heading into the small cave with the thoqqua hole that Dzedz's cousin showed them. 

A major advantage of the hole is that there are no dwarves standing there, waiting to collect a toll when the party enters (or leaves) the dungeon. As long as nothing ever ambushes them inside the tunnel, the group reasons, it is a superior means of ingress into the dungeon. Our heroes (such as they are) crawl again through the long smooth tunnel and emerge into the apparantly natural chamber where it terminates. 

That strange, distant gibbering echoes all around them. 

“What the hell is that?” Flint exclaims. 

“We don't know yet,” Dzedz says.

“Let's go find out,” Mad Max suggests, and unlimbers his maul.

The chamber they are in has one exit, which rapidly forks. The first they try leads to a natural passage; tufts of filthy, matted hair lie here and there on the cavern floor. They turn around and head the other way, entering another natural cave. The gibbering is louder. Suddenly Max, in the lead, comes to an abrupt halt. 

“Watch out!” he cries. 

Then the giant spider descends from above, landing next to Carl Hungus and sinking its fangs into the dragonborn's shoulder. Fortunately, his green heritage makes him resistant to the spider's venom, but he still cries out in pain as the fangs dig deep holes into him. 

Dzedz blasts the thing with a _fire bolt,_ while the group's new halfling companion draws a rapier and leaps to the fore, thrusting the tip into the spider's thorax. The creature draws back, and Flint stabs it in the head, just missing an eye. More arcane flames blast it, and the thing falls onto its back, charred legs curling up.

“Damn!” swears Mad Max. “I didn't even have a chance to react!”

“I didn't, either,” grumbles Hungus.*

“You okay?” Flint asks. Hungus nods- “It's just a scratch”- and the group continues exploring. 

The passage they are following soon breaks into an area of strange, unnaturally smooth stone. Dzedz frowns; it is neither dwarf-work nor the craftsmanship of any other folk that he can identify. The passage leads them into a large square chamber, its walls painted with scenes of elemental forces at work, churning together in a chaotic mess. Four pillars support the ceiling, each painted with images of of one of the four classical elements. Interestingly, the floor is wet. 

“Hmm,” says Dzedz.

Flint starts to move into the room, but Max grabs his arm to halt him. “Hang on a second. I don't trust this. Look, it's wet. This has to be a trap.”

The group turns and heads back the other way, past the corpse of the spider, returning to the natural passage. Flint raises a hand. “Listen,” he murmurs. The party halts, straining their ears. 

“Sounds like water,” says Dzedz. 

“I don't hear anything,” declares Hugus. Mad Max shrugs. 

They move forward cautiously. The passage opens onto the shore of a rapidly-moving underground river. As they start to look around, a figure from the shadows springs forth with a loud roar. 

The creature looks like a goblin, but it has an exceptionally large nose and ears, with a mottled, warty, rubbery-looking, green complexion. He's bigger than most goblins, too. 

Though the party has no way of knowing it, this is Vicous Toby.

Vicous Toby attacks with claws and bite, delivering terrible wounds. Benthum goes down with a shriek, and both Mad Max and Carl Hungus suffer greivous wounds. The blows they deal in return rapidly heal before their eyes. 

Though the party has no way of knowing this, either, Vicious Toby is half-troll. 

But the party is capable of delivering terrific damage. Vicious Toby's regeneration can't keep up. Even though he nearly eviscerates Max and leaves Hungus barely standing, once Dzedz realizes that Toby can't regenerate while he's being burnt, the dwarven wizard unleashes a steady stream of _fire bolts_ until, finally, the tenacious little half-goblin falls. 

“Nice!” exclaims Mad Max. 

“Speak for yourself,” groans Hungus, binding Benthum's wounds. “I'm hurting.” 

Flint steps up and sings a spell, first on Benthum and then on Hungus. Even so, the entire party is shaken and bloodied from the battle. They collect what loot they can find and retreat to the thoqqua hole. 

“Good thing we got a healer before we went down here,” remarks Dzedz. “But we'll have to be careful. It's dangerous down there.”

“And we still don't know what that gibbering is,” adds Flint.

***

“It's a good year for griffons,” remarks Sarec, staring into the sky. Indeed, there are three griffons circling to the north, clearly watching prey- perhaps a wild garen or a goat that had strayed from its herd. 

“Uh,” grunts his companion, Drolc. 

Sarec is a human, and he wouldn't normally associate with someone with orcish blood, but Drolc has, over the years that they have known each other, shown himself to be of unusually good nature- no doubt due to the influence of his human half. Even so, Sarec would have long since left Drolc to his own devices, were it not for the fact that Drolc is just so stupid. He is dumber than many dogs that Sarec has known. In fact, he's dumber than some _doors_ that Sarec has known. He drools on himself. He doesn't understand when people respond to him negatively. He barely comprehends money and the concept of paying for things. He has the mind of a slow four-year-old. Without someone to take care of him, the poor fellow would probably have died long ago. 

But as time has gone by, his good nature has never wavered. Never has Drolc acted out of cruelty, as one would expect from someone with orcish blood. Never has he tried to force his attentions on a woman, or has he bullied his way into some shiny possession. Never has he stolen, not even a meal, not even when he was hungry indeed. Drol seems filled with an innate sense of right and wrong, almost as if his body were filled not with blood, but with liquid weal. 

Sarec, on the other hand, is something of a savage. Disheveled, rarely well-bathed, often with twigs in his hair, the man has lived on the outskirts for his entire life, shunning the city much of the time. His unlikely friendship with Drolc has grown despite the differences between them. 

One thing they share, though, is a need to support themselves. Thus, they find themselves on the way down to the Black Gorge, ready to pay their way into the megadungeon they have heard about. 

And this is how they meet (and join) the rest of our heroes. 

*These two both have very bad passive Perceptions and spend a fair amount of time being surprised.


----------



## the Jester (Aug 7, 2018)

The city has many tales. Oh yes, do not be fooled into believing that the story I have been telling you is the only one of, or in, the city. There are many more, and they intersect, many of them, interweaving like strands on a loom. You only see the pattern on rug when you look at the whole from above. 

Hear, for instance, the cries of the prophet near the gates. “The end has come!” he shouts. “The world is over! Our time is done! Can't you hear the call of the gods? They want us to move on to a better place. Follow me, and I will lead you there!”

We shall hear of him again. His story will interweave with many others in this city.

See the tensions rising as secret emissaries from the farmers argue their case to the druids of the Oaken Circle. “It's time to take drastic action!” a pregnant woman cries. “We can't wait any longer! We're barely better than slaves!”

“What you are suggesting could harm the entire city,” one of the druids replies.

“Then maybe they'll listen for once!”

Or look back in time a few years, to an angelic visitation, selecting a young half-elven woman for divine attention... perhaps for a special fate. Her story will touch us, too, as will that of her brother and his lover. 

But let's get back to the seven heroes, standing together atop the Black Gorge in animated discussion. 

***

Seven strong! Seven, now! That's quite a party!

Flint, of course, ready with bardic magic. The halfling with the dwarvish name. Then Sarec, leaning against the haft of his halberd; the two dragonborn, Carl Hungus and Mad Max, who is packing another bowl of hempflower; Dzedz Orcslayer, dwarf evoker; Drolc, half-orc with one-third of a brain; and, of course, Benthum, reluctant companion, something between a slave and a very well-paid man-at-arms.

Don't get too used to this particular group. 

By now they have introduced themselves, and have established that they are all adventurers, and all are interested in the megadungeon for one reason or another. They've even made a run into town in the hopes of finding a healer for Dzedz's manhood, but alas, there is nobody powerful enough to do so. 

“There might be someone in the dungeon that I'm supposed to find,” Dzedz now remarks. “This guy I know, Lazarus, asked me to find this wizard... Mileen, I think it was.” 

“We're looking for someone, too,” says Sarec, “but we're bounty hunters.”

“Bad man,” Drolc agrees. 

“Yes, Drolc, the bad man.” Sarec pulls a folded wanted poster out of his purse and passes it over to the dwarf. Dzedz unfolds the battered sheet and studies it for a moment, then grunts and passes it to Hungus.

“We haven't seen him,” says Hungus, “but maybe we could help each other out.”

“For equal shares of the treasure, of course,” adds Mad Max.

“Have you had any luck finding your Mileen?” asks Sarec. 

“Not yet.”

“Well!” Sarec grins and claps his hands together, momentarily leaving his halberd to balance on its butt end before grabbing it again. “Let's go!”

“Only this time,” suggests Dzedz, “let's go in the front.” He glances at the newcomers. “Do you know about the fee?”

***

The dwarves are happy to admit the party to the dungeon, once everyone pays the entry fee. One of them leads the party down the stairs and into the first area, which they call the Dwarf-Works, and then returns above. Down below, more dwarves are on guard; one leads the party through a series of halls and chambers, then down another long passage.

Drolc wrinkles his nose. “Stinks.”

Their guide nods. “Aye, that'd be the garbage.” The passage opens into a very large room, lit with torches in sconces and lanterns set upon the floor. A large heap of refuse is in the center. Several more dwarves are on guard, scowling at the far end of the chamber, where the finished walls give way to rough, unfinished work.

“Down there.” The dwarf who walked them here points to where the rough area fades into blackness. “At the far end, there's a breach into the dungeon proper. Good luck.” With that, she turns and trots away.

“All right, then,” mutters Flint. 

The group moves forward, lighting a torch of their own. Dzedz casts _light_ on Hungus' shield, as well. At the end of the chamber they find the aforementioned breach- a hole that leads into a passageway, running to the right and left. They move through. The hallway is very high and wide, with strange, unnaturally smooth stonework that seems to hold itself up without more than minimal supporting architecture. “I've never seen anything like this,” Dzedz remarks. 

***

They head to the left. The hall they are in is easily big enough for them to walk four abreast, but that's nothing compared to the huge chamber that it leads to. It extends well beyond their light, both across and to the right, though they are near the left hand portion. As they start to move in, a brace of kobolds attacks them, howling and yipping as they charge out from the darkness. 

They outnumber our heroes, but not badly. And our heroes outweigh and outclass them. Blades cut, hammers crush, spells scorch, and the fight is over. 

The giant room is some sort of ruined bazaar. The ruins of many booths and small shacks are smashed in the central zone.

“Who the heck set these up?” wonders Flint. “They're too big for kobolds.”

“A lot of them are too big for humans,” Dzedz notes. 

They keep exploring. There are many exits from the huge hall. They pick one and find a hallway. It turns to the right after a short distance, but past the corner it slopes upward. 

“Huh,” says Hungus.

They advance. The shaft levels out and turns again before entering another kobold-infested chamber with some sort of mechanism in it. After a brief clash, the heroes check out the weird mechanism. It consists of several large, thick chains that run up from the floor, across a cog, and then back out through the floor. Some sort of large metal spoke extends from one wall and through a link in the chain.

Dzedz studies it for a moment. “I bet if we disengage this, something somewhere else moves.”

“Let's wait until we know what it might be,” suggests Flint. 

“Chain,” remarks Drolc.

There are no other ways out of the chamber. The group returns to the ruined bazaar and picks another exit. 

***

They explore several chambers and halls in a bewildering array of directions, getting caught by a swinging blade trap at one point. It's obvious that the kobolds inhabit this general area in numbers; the party repeatedly encounters groups of them and either puts them to the sword or chases them off. Still, some of the encounters leave wounds on our heroes, and soon enough Flint's bardic healing magic is being taxed. 

“Oh, uh, I might be able to help,” says Hungus. He _lays on hands_, causing some of the damage Mad Max has taken to fade.

“Thanks! I didn't know you were religious, Hungus.”

“Oh, hm.” Hungus turns away. “Anyway, I-”

“Who's your god?” 

“That's not important right now. Anyway, let's-”

“I think it is. I think you should tell us who your god is.”

Hungus heaves an exasperated sigh. “Don't worry about it.”

“What kind of priest won't talk about their god?” Mad Max demands. “This is madness!”

“I'm not a priest,” Hungus retorts, “I'm a paladin.”

“Oh!”

And with that, the subject changes. 

_You don't really need to know,_ thinks Hungus. Somewhere in a distant corner of his mind, he hears a five-fold roar.

***

It's not just kobolds, of course. At one point, they fight a foursome of orcs, who prove much more dangerous than the kobolds. And when the group finds a strange, dead garden, several of the shrubs extract themselves from their dry beds and reveal themselves to be twig blights. 

But there are seven members of the party! Seven! 

Together, they break the twig blights, run through the orcs, scatter the kobolds that they meet. 

Unfortunately, this doesn't find them either Mileen or the wanted person, whose name is Pa'ash Svenko.

On the bright side, they do find whaa the chain mechanism leads to. With kobold corpses strewn all about, Dzedz exclaims, “It's an elevator!”

There is a lever in the back wall of the cage-like contraption, currently in the uppermost position of three. The chains run both up through the ceiling and down through the floor. The party hurries back to the hallway that led to the mechanism- perhaps not surprisingly, it's pretty close by- and disengages the metal pick from the chains. Then they return to the elevator and crowd inside. 

“Let's go!” grins Sarec, throwing the lever down to its central position.

With an awesome clattering sound, the elevator begins to descend. 

_*Next Time:*_ The party descends!


----------



## the Jester (Aug 7, 2018)

The elevator begins to descend, but slowly, oh so slowly. Our heroes crouch to try to see what's in the chamber below as it comes into view.

Orcs! Orcs are in the chamber below!

The orcs are craning their necks to look at the elevator as it descends. As soon as they see that it is carrying what look like adventurers, they roar and begin hurling javelins upward at it. Some bounce off the bottom of the elevator and fall back to the floor. Flint yelps and ducks as another almost spears him in the head. 

The ceiling is 20' high, and the elevator is very slow. Too slow; Drolc jumps off the side, plummeting to the floor, where he lands with a painful grunt and then swings his sword. An orc staggers back, blood spraying. 

“Yeah!” roars Mad Max, and he leaps after his half-orc friend. Sarec, meanwhile, takes advantage of the reach of his halberd, and thrusts the spike down into one of the orcs's head.

The orcs are tough- significantly tougher than the kobolds that the party dispatched so easily above. Most of the orcs take more than a single glancing blow to defeat. But soon enough, the party does manage to take them down, though they suffer a series of wounds, with Benthum being almost decapitated by a stroke from an orcish greataxe. Prompt medical attention keeps him alive, but after Hungus heals him and he comes to, his morale is clearly very, very low.

Meanwhile, Flint loots the bodies of the orcs. He finds a surprising amount of money on them- nearly thrity gold in assorted coins.

Dzedz eyes the guineas and marks in the mix with distaste.

There are two stone doors leading out of the chamber, plus the elevator itself. Hungus gestures at the lever. “We could go further down.”

“Yeah, but what's down there?” Dzedz shakes his head. “Whatever we find is probably going to be even more dangerous. We should wait until our power grows.”

The others agree to investigate one of the doors instead. It leads to a twisting hallway that shortly ends in another room, this one holding two orcs seated a table, arguing, attended by a handful of kobolds who are obviously slaves. 

There is a sudden explosion of violence. Weapons clash. The kobolds do themselves credit by fighting for their masters, but they fall quickly. The orcs do better, delivering several terrific wounds before falling, but fall they do. 

After the battle, neither Flint nor Hungus have any healing left. It's time to fall back. The party retreats to the elevator and ascends, then backtracks through the giant dark bazaar. 

This time, as they are leaving, they are attacked. A giant spider the size of a young goat descends on them from above, undetected until it strikes. Benthum shrieks in terror. Great hairy fangs sink into Dzedz's shoulder, and he gasps, but fortunately, his dwarven heritage keeps him from feeling the worst of the venom. 

_Smack!_ Hungus' maul smashes into the spider. It rolls away, regains its feet, scuttles toward them again. 

“I don't think so.” _Fwoosh!_ Dzedz's _flame bolt_ strikes true, consuming the spider. 

The party takes this attack to be a sign that retreating was, indeed, the right move. They continue to backtrack until they reach the breach into the dwarf-works, then pass through. The wan light of the lanterns in the garbage room ahead provides a strange sense of relief: they have made it!

“How'd it go?” asks one of the dwarves guarding the area. 

“Not bad,” Dzedz answers. 

The party starts to move through the chamber, but the dwarf snaps, “Hold it! Before you move any further out of the dungeon, you need to pay the fee. A gold per head.” Grumbling, the party pays up. Flint tries to give the dwarves a mark instead, but they laugh. “We don't take that city bullcrap. Real money only.” With a sniff, the halfling complies.  

The party returns to the city, reaching the gates not long before dark. “Nice timing,” one of the soldiers stationed at the gatehouse remarks. “Another half hour, and you'd be stuck outside until morning.”

***

Their next trip, rather than taking the elevator down, they explore the upper level of the dungeon. This leads them almost immediately into several encounters with stirges, which Dzedz is distressingly familiar with. “They're a common underground hazard,” he tells the others, his voice grim. “Think of them as like a cross between a mosquito and a bat, only they're the size of a cat. They're bloodsuckers and disease-carriers.”

They aren't the only vermin in the dungeon. More giant spiders- some with bodies almost as big as Dzedz's- roam the place, and our heroes have to deal with more than one of them. 

And there are less physical dangers, too. After the group passes through a hall lined with broken mirrors, they find that they have fallen under a curse that gives them ill luck. Wineskins leak, ruining nice clothes. The heel of a boot snaps off. Armor straps come undone. Rivets somehow work themselves loose. A torch manages to singe Dzedz's beard. 

None of them can do anything about it, but some time searching in town takes them to the Black Temple. 

The Black Temple is an imposing structure near the center of the city, in the Bronze District, which was once strictly a business district, but has also become home to the city's upper crust since the Upper District was converted to rice fields during the Fall. Structurally, it is more like a small stronghold than a more typical temple. It is the center of the worship of Vandreu, the Townsaver, also called the Black Sword and Black Shield for his holy weapons. The Black Temple is also the home of one of the city's factions- the Black Avengers. Not all of them are followers of Vandreu, but most are. Many are even paladins.

There are a few priests at the temple. The lesser priests cluck their regrets, unable to help; but the high priest proves able to break the curse in return for three favors from the party.

The whole while, Benthum presses them to go after his wife. “Please,” he begs them. “She might not even still be alive! Please! Oh, Tabitha!”

“Sure, we'll get her,” Hungus reassures his semi-slave. “I heard a rumor she's in the megadungeon.”

***

The first favor that the party must do for the Black Avengers is to seek out and slay an owlbear that has been harassing the lumberers who have been going into the forest south and east of the city. It's dangerous work, especially given that it's fairly loud, but everyone knows that the city needs wood. Wood is easier and closer than building-quality stone, which is even more dangerous to try to quarry. But all that noise attracts predators. 

“What's an owlbear?” asks Krud Johnson.

For this time, the party is not the same group that it was before. Indeed, Mad Max, Carl Hungus, Flint, and Dzedz are accompanied by a fellow named Krud Johnson, an acolyte of the temple. 

Get used to this. This particular party of adventurers will establish some very unorthodox methods of group assembly before long. And this particular party will almost never actually be this particular party. 
People will adventure with them, fall away, and return months or years later. The group will always remain unusually fluid.

“An owlbear,” says Dzedz, “is exactly what it sounds like. It's half owl and half bear.”

“They're very dangerous,” adds Hungus.

The group has another new member- Chewer, a foul-tempered mastiff that Mad Max selected for aggression. The warrior can barely restrain the dog on his chain.

***

The party issues forth from the city's gates. The roadway descends to the plains in the south, while to their left, the river- now known as the Fandelose River- twists its way through thicker vegetation. The river is essentially the border between the plains and the forest to the east. 

The party follows the road south for a time, then veers east to an old bridge. Though cracked in places, the bridge is still serviceable, and our heroes pass across it into the woods.

Before long they begin to see signs of the foresters' work: tree stumps, areas where logs have been de-barked and de-limbed, small firepits, and the like. Not long after that, they start to hear distant chopping and sawing sounds.

There are other noises, too- movement in the woods. This is just more foresters, but our heroes treat the sounds with the sort of enthusiastic recklessness that one might expect of fairly novice adventurers.

“Chewer!” Mad Max cries. “Kill!” And he releases his hound. 

Chewer lunges through the foliage, barking wildly. An all-too-human scream sounds from the other side.

“Uh-oh,” says Krud. 

The party fights through the brush, but they're too late to save the hapless forester. What's left of his face looks like ground meat. Chewer is hungrily chomping on the man's cheek, ripping away hunks of flesh. Two more foresters look on in horror.

“Chewer!” cries Mad Max. “Bad boy! Down, boy!”

_*Next Time:*_ Oops! Will our 'heroes' have any better luck with their owlbear hunt than eating the faces of the people they're supposed to protect? I guess we will see....


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## the Jester (Aug 8, 2018)

Blood dripping from his muzzle, Chewer raises his head long enough to flatten his ears and give a warning growl. 

“That's a bad dog,” Flint opines.

“No, he's not a bad dog!” Mad Max protests, advancing cautiously until he can take the far end of the chain that serves as the mastiff's leash. “He just didn't understand...”

“Nolin!” cries one of the lumberjacks, staring aghast at his faceless friend. The other forester turns and flees. Chewer raises his hackles and tenses, as if about to spring. 

“Down, boy!” Mad Max commands.

The mastiff jumps, but the chain goes taut, holding him to Mad Max, who swiftly strides up to the dog and clouts it. “Knock that off!” he scolds. 

Meanwhile, the final forester turns and runs, sobbing, into the woods. 

“We're here to protect you from the owlbear,” Flint yells after him.

For a moment, the only sound is the rumbling growl of the dog. Thennn Dzedz remarks, “That could have gone better.”

***

Flint argues unsuccessfully for putting the dog down, especially now that he has developed a taste for human blood. Failing to win that argument, he suggests at least compromising by cleaning the blood off of Chewer's face. But Chewer doesn't seem too interested in being washed, so Mad Max offers a compromise of his own and packs a bowl of hempflower, following it up with a skin of rice wine.

The foresters are less amenable to Max's apology, but what can they do? The party is heavily armed and armored, and they have that growling, blood-faced beast at hand. So the bravest of the dozen woodsmen that have gathered, nervously clutching their axes, appoints herself their speaker and steps over to the party. “What do you people want?” she asks. “We don't have any money.”

“We're actually here to help you with the owlbear problem,” Hungus answers. 

“Yes,” Max interjects, “this hound is specially trained to seek out owlbears! Uh, sorry about your friend.”

The woman stares at him for a moment, then shakes her head. “You've killed as many of us as it has.”

“Oh, uh, whoops.”

She shakes her head. “Well, good luck to you.” 

“Any idea where we can find it?” asks Krud. 

She shrugs. “Deeper in the woods. We've heard its call from the east.”

East it is, then. The party leaves the traumatized woodsmen behind, watching for any sign of the owlbear. Benthum asks, “What about my wife?”

“We'll get to her, don't worry,” Hungus lies.

The woods get thicker very rapidly. Right along the river is where most of the wood that makes its way to Fandelose is felled, for it can be poled upstream and ultimately carried the shortest possible distance. Some especially bold folk have tried taking it overland by wagon, but this has been less successful, with several such attempts failing and the people involved simply never returning to the city. Presumably, they were eaten by monsters, enslaved by hobgoblins, or worse. Thus, one need go only a few hundred yards east of the foresters to find areas where the woods have grown and thickened, uninterrupted by any humanoid touch, for forty years or more. 

Our heroes thus find themselves pushing through significant amounts of underbrush and tangled thickets. It is hard work, and it is taking them further away from the city's influence than most of the party have been before. There are many types of trees and birds that they have never seen before. Strange chirps and hoots sound around them. 

Then, a strange sound, unlike anything any of them have heard before, yet somehow impossible not to recognize immediately:

*”RRRAAAH-HOOOOOOO!”*

“That,” says Dzedz, “has _got_ to be an owlbear.”

The party moves through the brush, heading toward the sound. The call is followed by an ungodly loud squawking and roaring, and by thrashing and crashing noises. 

“Maybe it's fighting something,” says Hungus. “That would be perfect! It might even already be wounded!”

“Or maybe we'll have to fight whatever it's fighting, too,” says Krud, but nobody is listening. With a shrug, he moves after them. 

But when they burst through the foliage, they find that the owlbear isn't fighting. In fact, it isn't an owlbear at all. 

It's _two_ owlbears. And they're mating. 

What an embarrassing scene! For a moment, the more naïve members of the group consider giving the owlbears time to finish before engaging them, but Krud dispels any notion of avoiding battle by immediately casting a _sacred flame_ at the female (or at least, the one being mounted by the other). Benthum fires a sling bullet at the same one, while Flint mocks it viciously. 

“Get 'em, Chewer!” 

Mad Max release the chain, and his mastiff rushes forward, barking wildly, and attacks the male owlbear. The dog sinks his teeth into the owlbear's ankle. The owlbear roars, and Mad Max leaps forward and deals it a mighty blow with his maul. 

Then Dzedz steps up and blasts the two owlbears with a _thunderwave._ If the previous attacks hadn't ruined their moment, this certainly does, blowing them apart and echoing in the surrounding woods. 

The owlbears are both enraged. Really, who wouldn't be? They pick themselves up and rumble forward, all claws and teeth. The female rushes forward and snaps at Dzedz; only a timely _shield_ spell saves him. But even that doesn't protect him from a telling swipe from the owlbear's claw. 

Meanwhile, the male advances on Chewer, slashes him with a claw, and then literally bites his head off, ending any chance of the “put the dog down” debate revivifying itself. 

Carl Hungus leaps to the attack. He brings his maul up and around into the female's side, and there is a dazzling burst of light as he smites it. The monster opens its terrifying beak and lets out that characteristic howl again: “RAAAA-HOOO!”

Mad Max screams, “Chewer! Nooooo!!!” With a sob, he rushes forward and strikes the male owlbear as hard as he can, cracking it in the chest with his massive hammer. The party surges forward, everyone striking resolutely and hard, and in a moment more, both owlbears succumb to their blistering assault. 

But it is too late for Chewer. 

***

Mad Max grieves in his own way. He drinks deep from his wineskin, finishing it off and tossing it aside before starting a fresh one. 

“Well, that's the first thing,” says Dzedz. 

“Huh?” Mad Max hasn't been paying a lot of attention. 

“We have to do two more favors for the Black Temple before we're square.”

“Oh yeah! What's next?”

“They said something about providing security at a protest.”

“What's the third thing?”

“We have to deliver some kind of message for them.”

“Huh. That's a lot of work.”

“Remember how much that mirror curse sucked?” Hungus says. He shakes his head. “We need to stay on the Black Avengers' good side in case we need help like this again.”

The party crosses the river, again taking the bridge, and turns north along the old roadway. 

Mad Max brightens. “Hey, it isn't too late yet. What do you guys say we go back into the megadungeon on the way home?”

_*Next Time:*_ Heads!


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## the Jester (Aug 18, 2018)

The party once more pays the dwarves guarding the entrance to allow them into the megadungeon. They return to the elevator that they found previously and descend once again, this time throwing the lever all the way down rather than to the middle position. Unlike the first time they took it, nothing guards the first room down. 

“We could explore...” Flint suggests.

“Let's go down,” says Mad Max. “We just killed two owlbears! We're bad ass!”

Down they go. 

The elevator ends its descent in another room of unnaturally smooth stone. Dzedz shakes his head. “Magic must have been involved in this. This ceiling needs supports, but it doesn't have them.” He scowls. 

A single door leads out. When opened, it reveals a 15' wide passageway heading away. The party forms up into a marching order, with Hungus and Max in the lead, and moves out. Unfortunately, neither of them is very observant, and when they reach a four-way intersection after around 60', they are caught entirely off guard by a sudden flock of stirges. 

“Not doing this!” says Dzedz. He casts a _thunderwave,_ catching the entire group of stirges, and slays them all with a single spell. 

Crud shakes his head. “That's impressive!”

“I have a thing about stirges.”

“Forward?” Flint prompts, and the group advances through the intersection. A short passage ends in a stone door. When they throw it open, they see a chamber that they recognize, with four pillars, each carved with representations of elemental forces. 

“We've been here,” says Mad Max. 

Dzedz, who has been mapping, digs out his parchments from their previous expeditions into the dungeon. After a moment, he jabs his finger at one of them. “Here. We're actually pretty close to the thoqqua hole.”

“Where to, then?” asks Flint.

Mad Max strides to one of the doors leading out of the chamber and throws it open in answer to the halfling's question. Then his face contorts in disgust, and he steps in. “There's bodies in here.” He wrinkles his nose. “Ugh.” He peers at the closest body. “There's something wrong with his ears.”

The others follow him into the room, but even as they file in, the bodies in the chamber are starting to jerk and move strangely, not rising, but.... 

“What the hell?” exclaims Crud. 

With a wet ripping sound, the heads of the corpses in the chamber detach. Their ears, our heroes belatedly realize, are distended, oversized, and now they begin to flap like the wings of bats. Grotesquely, the heads begin to shriek as they fly towards the adventurers. Benthum seizes up in terror, letting out a low moan. 

“Agh!” Hungus cries, and swings his maul at the nearest head, missing it cleanly. It bobs and weaves past him, and Flint manages to score a wound on it as it does. Then it gives Dzedz a horrible kiss, pushing a swollen tongue into his mouth. 

The dwarf wizard pushes away, tripping and falling on his back. He gags. Even with the lack of acuity typical of the dwarven sense of taste, he nearly vomits. 

Crud calls down the power of his god in a _sacred flame,_ damaging one of the flying heads. Mad Max roars and enters a rage, then smashes another against the wall of the chamber, squishing it and sending blackened brains squirting onto the floor.

Two heads remain- then one, as Hungus strikes down the wounded. The party turns their attention on the final one and slays it in a few moments.

Dzedz is still coughing and spitting, trying to clear the taste from his mouth. He takes a drink of ale and swishes it around his mouth, then spits it out. 

“You okay?” asks Mad Max.

“I'll be fine,” the dwarf answers, but he's wrong.

***

The room with the flying heads has no other exits out of it, so the party backtracks to the chamber with the four pillars in it. Two exits that lead from it remain untried- or so it seems, until Dzedz looks again at his other map. “Actually, we've been that way. That passage leads to the thoqqua hole. But we haven't checked out that final door there.”

The door opens onto a chamber full of strange smoke. When our heroes enter, they find themselves starting to fall asleep, so they quickly leave the chamber behind. 

“Are we ready to go back to the city yet?” asks Benthum. 

Flint smirks. “You know, if we go out through the thoqqua hole, we won't have to pay the dwarves.”

Exeunt, stage right.

***

When the party gets out of the Black Gorge, night has already fallen. The city gates are shut for the night.

“Hey, guys!” Mad Max calls to the guards. 

“Hey, Max,” one of them says.

“Any chance you can let us in?”

“Ah, sure.”

It pays to have a soldier from the Army in your party. There will be times aplenty when this group or another won't be so lucky and will have to wait out the night outside the safety of the walls. But Mad Max is a soldier of the Red Battlet, and there is a code amongst the soldiers. They take care of one another. They are brothers are sisters of a special family, one born not of the blood of the womb but of the blood that they spill in defense of one another. 

The party disperses into the city, going to the various places that they call home.

Despite his hearty constitution, Dzedz doesn't feel very well. His tongue is swollen. And he still can't get that taste out of his mouth.

***

Speaking of tastes, how about that bean juice? Rich, hearty, hot, and heady. Cafes are all the rage. They are open all over the city, almost as prevalent as taverns. As the fad has taken hold over the last few years, people have experimented with different ways to fix it. Some add the milk of goats or rice; others put in a pad of butter. Some salt it, some put sugar in, a few add a mash of hot peppers. 

Right now, the fact that the entire supply that is available, or that is likely to be available, is what is stored away in the city has not become much of a factor in its price. There is yet to be a scarcity. Even so, a cup of bean juice averages around one mark in price. 

For now, though it's a bit on the pricy side, bean juice is within almost everyone's reach, at least once in a while.

For now.

***

Dzedz awakens halfway through the night, gagging on the taste of his own tongue. He is sweaty, feverish. He hawks up a massive loogie, and it is as black as firestone and smells of rot. 

His head swimming, the dwarf rises, throws on a robe, and stumbles out into the street. He makes his shambling way through the darkness of the nighttime streets of the Lower District up the hill into the lit roads of the Bronze District, and thence to the Black Temple. 

Dzedz puts himself further into debt.

***

Anyone remember Hkatha? Hkatha Ilmixie? One of the Heroes of Fandelose during the Fall, who helped save the city and ensure that _something_ survived?

Hkatha Ilmixie, founder of the School for Gifted Youngsters, is a noble of one of Fandelose's old lines. The Ilmixie are a house with a somewhat ambiguous reputation. While, yes, Hkatha was a great hero in his day, it is whispered that his line sometimes spontaneously produces tieflings, and everybody knows what that means. 

Well, if you _don't_, then let me spell it out for you: At some point in the past, the Ilmixies had dealings with fiends. Probably devils. Sure, they're a human family- except for the occasional spawn that shows their _true_ nature. It's not entirely common; not every generation has one, although Tzizz is only two generations removed from Hkatha, and that young fellow is clearly a tiefling.

But we're not talking about Tzizz, not yet. Today, we're talking about Roran- a scion of the house that doesn't have the horns or tail or hooves. No, Roran is full-blooded human, with no taint in him... except that that he might pass down to his descendants, thanks to the dubious choices made by his ancestors. 

Roran is a young Ilmixie, skilled with a bow. A noble who has spent little time outside the walls, yet fancies himself a ranger (perhaps an urban one?). Eager to prove his worth to his house, to make his grandfather Hkatha proud, Roran has always been somewhat disappointed in his lack of sorcerous potential. He always wanted to be a gifted youngster- to go to that school, to have the natural talents that earned such intense attention from his grandfather. But then, some of those youngsters found their powers too much to deal with. There are even a few, Roran knows, who had to be sent to Professor Whorl's Institute for Study of the Mind when they went mad after their magical abilities first manifested uncontrollably. 

He never had the potential for sorcery. Instead, he trained in more martial pursuits, following his natural sharp eye and steady hand to the center of the target. His arrows land closer to the center than most, and he got better every year. Yet he was not yet blooded. He was too young to have fought in the war against the Hand, or when the city was breached by the Scarlet Fist. He had not yet taken a turn atop the wall while enemies assaulted Fandelose, but the next time they did, he would. And he would show himself a hero.

“Are you listening?” Hkatha asks. 

“Huh?” Roran snaps out of his daydreaming. 

Hkatha heaves an exasperated sigh. “Damn it, I'm not repeating myself. Go to the Cerulean Tower and see a man named Lazarus. Tell him I sent you. And help him with his problem.”

***

Lazarus' problem, of course, is that his colleague Mileen is still missing, and he's increasingly afraid that she isn't coming back. He introduces Roran to Dzedz, Flint, and Carl Hungus, who explain that they have been searching dilligently, to no avail. Innocent whistling and all that. 

“This is Laharl Umbra,” says Lazarus. “He'll be going with you to help.” Though he doesn't say it, everyone in the room understands that Laharl is also there to make sure that the party is actually doing its job. 

***

Mad Max, meanwhile, is too busy with his day job for adventuring. But he's been giving it a lot of thought, and he's decided that it is time to switch from chain mail to bare-chested manliness. He redesigns his garb to be more metal in the metaphorical sense, while having far less in the literal sense. 

“I've been channeling my anger lately,” he explains happily to one of his co-workers.*

Another pops in. “Hey, did you hear about that new clinic on the edge of town? I hear that the guy who runs it harvests organs from people who die in his care.”

“What for?” 

“I have no idea, but the guy's supposed to be really creepy.”

“Ha, sure. What's he gonna do, eat a bunch of livers?”

“I wouldn't put it past him.”

“Huh. Madness.” Mad Max packs a bowl of hempflower in his pipe. “Let's smoke a bowl.”

_*Next Time:*_ Things go horribly wrong in the megadungeon!


*In other words, Max has gone from being a fighter to a fighter/barbarian.


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## SeldomSeen (Sep 11, 2018)

I'm so glad I remembered that Enworld story hour was a thing!  Good to see you posting these Jester.


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## the Jester (Sep 14, 2018)

SeldomSeen said:


> I'm so glad I remembered that Enworld story hour was a thing!  Good to see you posting these Jester.




Hey, thanks! Good to see you back on here. I'm not sure if you saw it, but I recently finally finished the story hour for my Davis 4e group.


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## SeldomSeen (Sep 15, 2018)

I did, I reread the whole thing!  I really glad the story is up there because I didn't remember half the stuff we did!


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## Baron Opal II (Sep 21, 2018)

Hey Jester!

Glad to see you were able to post again. I've missed the adventures in Cydra.

Speaking of such, I'd like to get a look at the timeline of your world if possible? I poked around after reading these again, and it seems that Wikispaces is no more. I hope you still have copies of your data about.


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## the Jester (Sep 26, 2018)

Baron Opal II said:


> Hey Jester!
> 
> Glad to see you were able to post again. I've missed the adventures in Cydra.
> 
> Speaking of such, I'd like to get a look at the timeline of your world if possible? I poked around after reading these again, and it seems that Wikispaces is no more. I hope you still have copies of your data about.




Thanks, it's good to be doing it again! I spent several years with my writing efforts focused on a trilogy of novels (and am at the stage where I am editing/getting others to look them over/etc). 

I'm at my girlfriend's house for the next few days, so I don't have all my notes available, especially from earlier editions. However, I'll be happy to post something after I get home. I can probably answer specific questions if you have some, though not in great detail or accuracy regarding the early eras (e.g. the time of the Elder Elves, the Miloxi era, etc).


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## Baron Opal II (Sep 28, 2018)

An idle question I had was the rought timeline of "recent" events. The "modern age" of cydra we've been exposed to is from just after the defeat of Fuligin to the times of Fandelose. I'm a bit confused as to how events flowed and where the big time jumps are. There's a couple of millennial time skips there, I believe.


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## the Jester (Sep 28, 2018)

Baron Opal II said:


> An idle question I had was the rought timeline of "recent" events. The "modern age" of cydra we've been exposed to is from just after the defeat of Fuligin to the times of Fandelose. I'm a bit confused as to how events flowed and where the big time jumps are. There's a couple of millennial time skips there, I believe.




Yeah, there's one big jump after the end of the 3e epic stuff- Thrush was installed as the new emperor of (what would become) the Sword Empire, and then we wrapped up. When I started the 4e game, I advanced time an indeterminate amount, but probably no less than several thousand years, given the long lifespans of epic 3e pcs. The whole idea there was to push the setting past the point when the last of the epic characters would no longer be a going concern; everyone is dead/merged with the land/ascended into a heavenly form/whatever. I did not want to have to mess around with converting level 30+ epic pcs into a new edition, especially since the 4e epic rules were, at least initially, pretty thin. (Though I have to say that, by the end, they turned out to be my favorite iteration of epic D&D so far!) 

So the timeline that has been written up in the story hours, using the OLG (Our Lord Galador) calendar, is something like this:

c. 100 OLG- Dexter. This includes the Cydra: The Early Years story hour, as well as some of Delilah's Tale.

c. 217 to 225 OLG- Games after I moved to Davis, where the epic stuff (eventually) took place. This started with a party including Lucidemacs, Siglenisten, Maybell Nontrophia, Ruwena Chudstone, and others, which haven't been written up yet. This led to the conflict with Fuligin, which led the party to Darkhold, which led them to time travel back my old campaign setting, pre-apocalypse, in order to gather what was needed to both fight Fuligin and to turn Cydra from a simulation inside Darkhold into a real multiverse. I don't think any of this is written up except as flashbacks and exposition.

c. 320 or 330ish OLG- the pcs leave Darkhold, and find that approximately a century has slipped away. This era includes many groups and most of the story hours. 

Later by no less than 3,000 years- we get into the 4e and 5e stuff, including this thread,  Adventures in the Eastern Province, and the Fall of Civilzation. (The FoC is about 45 or 50 years before 'game present'.)

One story hour was set further still in the future- the Year 272 Campaign. It was set about 27,000 years ahead of the epic game, but was played long before the epic game finished up. So that's probably anywhere from 10,000 to 23,000 years from the current 'game present'. 

I hope that helps clear things up to some extent. One thing I'll note, though, is that a lot of the time skips are purposely somewhat vague, so that I can fill in details later as needed.


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## Baron Opal II (Sep 28, 2018)

the Jester said:


> The whole idea there was to push the setting past the point when the last of the epic characters would no longer be a going concern;



Makes perfect sense, I've done similar things.



> ...led them to time travel back my old campaign setting, pre-apocalypse, in order to gather what was needed to both fight Fuligin and to t*urn Cydra from a simulation inside D*arkhold into a real multiverse.



Oh... I seem to have missed that tidbit. Interesting.



> I hope that helps clear things up to some extent. One thing I'll note, though, is that a lot of the time skips are purposely somewhat vague, so that I can fill in details later as needed.



It does! Thank you.

I have a long standing campaign myself, and lately I've been organizing the DM's view of my timeline. Being vague on certain dates is important and useful to allow foresight!


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## the Jester (Sep 28, 2018)

Baron Opal II said:


> Oh... I seem to have missed that tidbit. Interesting.




I'm not sure exactly how explicitly that has ever been laid out in the story hours, actually... and it's some of the deep, hidden lore than most pcs (and even most of my current players!) are unaware of.


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## the Jester (Sep 28, 2018)

Let us not forget, this is not the story of Flint and Dzedz and Carl Hungus and Mad Max and Laharl. This is the story of any adventurer or party of adventurers. 

This is the story of Fandelose. This is the story of the city. 

The city has many problems. The Coal-Faced Bastards constantly skirmish with the Bronze Tigers, careful not to tread on the toes of the Grey Brothers by dabbling in murder for hire, while the Smoke Fades sit back in obscurity and steal from everyone. The drug trade thrives; of uncertain legality and drawing inconsistent responses, the pooorer sections of the city are replete with everything from the relatively innocuous hempflower to the extraordinarily toxic dzur and everything in between, from nose candy to goofballs. Sometimes the authorities ignore the trade; sometimes, they demand payment to ignore it. At other times, they drive hard into some bad neighborhood or other, Cat's River or Tiger Town or the Breach, and violently prosecute the dealers, meting out summary justice in back alleys and leaving bodies behind. 

The gangs know better than to respond in kind. The death of even one soldier of the White Battlet leads inevitably to harsh crackdowns, to revenge delivered more violently than any retort the gangs can muster. After all, the army is well-armed and armored, and they have the numbers. The Bastards still rememeber when, about fifteen years past, after a foolish lad caused an unfortunate escalation, even the youngest members of the gang who had been caught were found dumped in the alleys of their part of town, an unmistakable statement that the gangs should not go too far in provoking the army.

And then there's the money.

***

“You there!” Just shy of a shout, the call arrests Dzedz, Flint, Laharl, and Hungus in their tracks. The clatter of hobnailed boots on the cobbles marching toward them announces the White Battlet patrol. 

“Yes, officer?” asks Dzedz. 

“This is an illegal currency check,” the lead guard barks. “We need to search you.”

Laharl bristles, but Flint lays a hand on his arm and murmurs at him. The group submits to the search. It's either that or start a fight with the Army of Argos, and everyone knows that won't end well under the best of circumstances. 

“So what's this, then?” At its conclusion, the guard holds Flint's pouch full of silver and gold pieces. 

“Well,” Flint stammers, “we just re-entered the city from the megadungeon. I was on my way to a moneychanger, I swear!”

“A likely story.” The guard shakes his head and the pouch vanishes into the patrol's evidence box. So do Dzedz's coins. The others have already paid the moneychangers their 3% fee to change their gold to marks, and fortunately, the penalty for having illegal currency is no worse than confiscation. So the worst part of the situation is that both Flint and Dzedz are broke all over again. 

The disgruntled adventurers seek out a tavern to drown their sorrows, with Hungus buying for his two demonetized allies. 

“I told you you should have changed those coins,” Hungus sighs, taking a sip of his drink. 

Dzedz snorts disdainfully. “Pay some crooked banker to turn my gold into bronze? I don't think so. Your city's money is stupid. You might as well draw denominations on paper, for all it's worth.” He takes another drink. It will take a lot more of them to drive the sick, dry, decayed flavor from his throat. _If not for the Black Temple..._ he thinks.

“It's not worthless,” Laharl retorts, “as long as it pays for my bean juice and wine.”

“I guess we can go back in tomorrow or the next day,” says Hungus. “There's bound to be lots more treasure down there.”

“Gold pieces and marks,” adds Flint. Dzedz snorts again and shakes his head.

“We should have killed those guards and burnt the bodies,” mutters Laharl. 

***

The next day, the poor all over again party checks in with Lazarus at the Cerulean Tower, with Dzedz hoping that the sages there might be able to provide the formulae for some spells that he could transfer into his own spellbook.

“Sorry,” Lazarus says, “the Collegiate isn't really an association of wizards. We're more sages and scholars. We do have a few hedge magicians and ritualists, but...” He shrugs. “However, if you can rescue Mileen, she is the most powerful wizard among us. She can probably help you out.”

“Great,” Dzedz grumbles. 

“On that score, I've got some additional help for you. House Ilmixie is offering the services of one of their number. His name is Rorin. He's actually supposed to be here any time to discuss the matter...”

Indeed, half an hour later, the young noble and the adventurers are exchanging introductions. Rorin's bearing betrays the confidence of the young, well-trained, and untested. Yet when Dzedz and Hungus ask for a demonstration of his skills, he shows excellent form with his bow. 

“All right,” says Flint. “Sounds like we're going back to Marble Hall.”

Yet the day slips away, and soon enough it's late afternoon. The party reconsiders, since starting their foray now is likely to leave them locked out of the city gates come nightfall, and settles on meeting up in the morning at one of Fandelose's numerous cafes. There, then, over steaming cups of bean juice, the group straps on its collective weapons, tightens its collective armor straps, shoulders its collective backpacks, and marches on its collective legs to the city gates, where Red Battlet guards wave them out after inquiring about their intentions. 

Down into the Black Gorge, then back into the megadungeon they go.

***

The group explores beyond the great ruined bazaar that they had previously found, and before they find any monsters or treasure, they find a trap. The floor swings open, leading not into the pit that they first expect, but into a long chute. They tumble down, seconds passing to mark how far they are falling, and then, shouting in dismay, they spill through a one-way metal flap that slaps closed behind them. They drop heavily onto a stone-floored chamber, leaving them momentarily stunned. 

Before they can regain their feet, something horrifying squirms out of an alcove to attack them. 

The thing is vaguely worm-like, with a green body and a yellow belly. It is as thick around as a man's waist. Its front end has several tentacles surrounding a vicious beak. It lashes out viciously, delivering a terrific wound to Laharl immediately and wrapping its tentacles around him. The thing makes a strange chirring noise as it tears into the warlock with its beak. Laharl screams, struggling to pull away- and the thing rips him in two. Blood and gore shower the others, who, though staggered from the fall and surprised by the sudden attack, scramble to their feet and draw weapons. 

Carl Hungus rushes forward and swings his maul, connecting solidly. And yet, the serpentine monster seems barely hurt. It turns on him, tentacles flailing. 

“It's resisting my weapons!” Hungus cries. 

Flint leaps in next to him, only to be yanked from his feet by those tentacles. The monster's slavering beak tears at his face, and the halfling shrieks in pain. “Help! It's got me!”

Dzedz steps right up to it and chants the syllables of a _thunderwave._ A tremendous report echoes through the room and down the halls. The monster tumbles back away from Flint, its grip broken, and Rorin manages to hit it with an arrow, doing some damage. The thing rights itself and scrambles back forward. 

From down the hall, the sound of more chirring comes. 

Flint and Hungus move to flank the monster, their weapons barely effective against it. “What is this thing?” the halfling cries.

Whatever it is, two more of them arrive, squirming their way into the chamber. Tentacles lash out, beaks dig into flesh. Groaning, Hungus falls onto one knee. Desperate, head swimming, he lays hands upon himself, trying to stave off doom.

Too little, too late. 

A beak rip into him. The monster trills, almost purring, as Hungus' blood sprays out. The dragonborn collapses. 

“Crap!” cries Rorin, leaping to the front, bow discarded, sword whipping free of its scabbard. He strikes, stabbing one of the monsters, trying to drive it back. Flint thrusts his rapier with all the adroitness he can muster, striking for whatever vitals the creature might have. But it isn't enough. 

Dzedz sends a _flame bolt_ sizzling into the most wounded monster, and finally it falls. But even as it does, the other two flail at Flint and bring him down, too. Collapsing, breath shallow, he groans once as his rapier tumbles from his hand to rest beside his unconscious form. 

_This isn't good,_ the wizard thinks grimly. Rorin stabs and cuts, but the monsters barely seem to feel his blows. Unfortunately, the young noble does feel their attacks, and screams in pain as a beak rips into his side. Blood starts to pour down, soaking the left half of his body.

“Help!” Rorin cries. 

“What do you think I'm doing?” shouts Dzedz, casting another _fire bolt._ The flames do seem to affect the monsters; the one he hit recoils momentarily, and the smell of burnt flesh tickles his nostrils. But the two monsters both still stand, and their tentacles smash into Rorin, leaving rough wounds on him. For a moment, he weaves on his feet. 

Then Rorin falls, and Dzedz stands alone. 

Desperate, the wizard steps up next to the monsters and casts another _thunderwave,_ blasting them back away from Rorin's bleeding form. 

Neither one falls. Both right themselves. The first- the one that is less wounded- wiggles forward, lashing out at Dzedz. Its tentacle slaps at Dzedz, and for a split second he considers casting _shield_ to protect himself. But he is almost out of spells already. To do so would be to forfeit the chance of another _thunderwave._ So he suffers the blow, staggering back a step, before unleashing another desperate _flame bolt,_ this one at point blank range. He hits the monster again, wounding it further. 

Then he realizes that the second monster isn't threatening him, because it is maneuvering to eat the unconscious Flint. Its razor-sharp beak stabs down into the halfling's throat. 

_No choice,_ thinks Dzedz grimly, and steps away from the monster threatening him. “Come on, you bastard!” he yells, as it strikes at him and misses. “Follow me!” 

It's a dangerous maneuver, but he draws the monster closer to the one eating Flint, and as soon as they are close enough together, he catches them both in his last _thunderwave._

*KRACKABOOM!*

The two monsters are blown backward. The one that had been starting to eat Flint doesn't rise. 

Unfortunately, Flint's limp form is also caught by the spell, and flips end over end, coming to rest against one of the walls of the chamber. He is very still. 

The final creature squirms forward, tentacles seeking its foe. Dzedz backs hurriedly away, then unleashes another _flame bolt_. 

He misses. 

The monster closes on the last of its prey that is still moving. Its tentacles seek him, slapping out. 

And it misses, too.

_One last chance,_ Dzedz thinks desperately. And he casts another _flame bolt_. 

This time, he hits the creature square in the head, burning it badly. It squeals, tries to turn around, and collapses. 

In the sudden quiet, the only sound is Dzedz's gasping breath. 

_How many levels deep am I?_ he wonders.

_*Next Time:*_ Is anyone but Dzedz alive? Things have gone very, very wrong for this party of adventurers. Fortunately, there are others...


----------



## the Jester (Oct 6, 2018)

“It's all over!” the street preacher cries. He stands, arms spread wide, wearing dark red and black. His hair is as wild as his eyes. “The world has ended!” The crowd moving past largely ignores him, but now and again another person joins those standing near him, watching him, listening to him. Most of them are destitute and unfortunate; some are diseased or crippled. Others are fit in body, but weak in mind. “It isn't going to end, it already has! It isn't in the middle of ending, it already has!” His voice rises and falls in a rhythm that is almost hypnotic. Some of those watching him walk away after a few moments, but others, enthralled, remain, and slowly his crowd grows. “The fall of the empire was a sign- but not the first sign! No, it was the last sign, and now the curtain has fallen!”

He pauses, febrile eyes taking in those closest to him. “But it isn't too late for you! Listen to me, follow me, and I will lead you to a new world- a better world! One that isn't hopeless, one whose final elements aren't falling into oblivion! Stay here, and there is no hope, but follow me, and I will lead you to Paradise!”

We will see more of this man. Oh yes. 

But we won't see those who follow him again, except as faces sketched on posters of the missing. 

***

In the waning days of the Sword Empire, generations after the death of Thrush, as the artificial bonds that tied the world-spanning empire together, a desperate decision was made at the highest levels. Because of the many rebellions springing up, because of the many independence movements, it was deemed necessary to remove maps from the public sphere. They presented too great of a risk of those rebellions spreading, of allowing revolutionaries to plan and find allies and bind together their own followers into armies, and given the network of long-distance transportation methods available to those who knew how to use them and where they led, maps were confiscated, burned, removed from libraries and homes, excised from books, cut out of tapestries.

From then on, maps were, and remain, state secrets. 

Even those showing small areas were forbidden to the public. A map of the streets of the city? Unthinkable. One that shows an entire isle or continent? Inconceivable. Only at the highest levels of the imperial bureacracy or military apparatus, or in the most secret places, were maps allowed to survive.

Of course, a few slipped through the cracks. Not many, but a few. Hidden in private libraries, held by secret societies or adventurers, these few maps have great value. 

Except, of course, that now most people would not even recognize a map for what it is. 

That is a part of the culture of Fandelose. Just so you know. 

***

“Hmmm,” Mad Max says. 

He is at the Fandelose Brewery, and has just gotten his mug filled. The beer- made from rice, Fandelose's primary grain- is thin and yellow, but available, which is the best thing this side of delicious. He takes a deep drink, wipes his mouth with his left hand, and takes another look around. 

_Where the hell is Hungus?_ he wonders. 

He has not seen his friend in several days. The two of them- as well as their other adventuring buddies- don't have a regular meeting place, exactly, but had been frequenting the brewery over the last week or two. It had been a convenient place to join up, since they're pretty nearly all heavy drinkers. But there has been no sign of him, or of Dzedz or Flint, for some time. 

Grumbling, Mad Max scans the crowd for anyone he does know. There's a remarkably tall young human with a scraggly beard- obviously the best he can grow at that age- that is dyed blue. And there's a halfling sitting a table away from his who is wearing a _sha shi,_ the cross-body sash that designates one as a monk of the Manticore Monastery. Next to him, talking animatedly, is a berobed human who has the distinct look of some kind of mage. Mad Max doesn't know any of them, but, should he need to recruit a whole new party... 

He keeps looking. Most of the people drinking here are farmers, merchants, craftsmen. Few are armed, fewer still armored. But- he squints- there is one man in the corner, looking lost, who seems... familiar. Mad Max sidles closer to get a better look. 

“Drolc!” he exclaims. 

The half-orc looks up at him and smiles. “Hullo!”

Happily, Mad Max pulls up a stool. “I was just looking for some of my adventuring buddies! Good to see you!” He pulls out his pipe, packs the bowl with pipeweed, and sets it alight, then passes it to Drolc. The half-orc declines, but the halfling in the _sha shi_ glances their way at the smell. Max gestures him over, and both he and the mage talking to him move over to join him.

“You look like adventurers,” Max declares. “That's a funny coincidence, because I'm looking for some adventurers.”

The blue-bearded youth turns his head at that. “Is that hempflower?” he calls. “Can I get in on that?”

“Sure.” Max offers him the pipe, and the fellow strides over to join them.

Introductions are made. The blue-bearded fellow calls himself Bluebeard (though his name turns out to be Tim); the halfling is Scotty Beandelver; the sorcerer, Zim Kairon; and Drolc reintroduces himself three times. Mad Max buys a round and passes his pipe.

Before long, this group has gotten drunk and high together (except for Drolc), and rather forgotten all about going adventuring.

***

The Manticore Monastery and the Pan Lung School are the city's two rival organizations of monks. The Manticore Monastery teaches the way of shadow; the Pan Lung School, the way of the open hand. Every spring, the two dojos have a large, public, semi-ceremonial battle in the streets. 

Of course, monks from the rival schools fight a lot more than just the one time each year. Promising young Manticore monks attempt to ambush and defeat Pan Lung warriors, demonstrating the superiority of their techniques, while those from the Pan Lung School seek to prove that their fighting style can overcome the sneakiness of the way of shadow. Often, small groups of tegh monks engage each other throughout the year. 

“That's why I want to find Master Lo,” Scotty explains with a hiccup. “He's out in the woods somewhere, secluded. They say he knows special secret techniques, and that he will teach them to those worthy enough to find him. He was brought up in the Manli- Manticore Monst- Manticore Monastery, just like me.” He belches. 

“That sounds like a good adventure!” Zim says, recalling how this whole meet-up started.

Mad Max takes another puff off his pipe. “Sure, I guess. Is there treasure?”

“The treasure,” Scotty explains, “is the techniques he teaches.”

“Hmm.” 

“Come on, we might as well try to find him!”

***

But, of course, things never go smoothly for a drunken band of adventurers.

En route to the city gates, they are ambushed by a group of young martial artists from the Pan Lung School. Before they know it, fists and feet are smashing into them. Scotty's _sha shi_ marks them as Manticore Monastery allies. 

The youths are no match for Mad Max; he is, by now, a relatively experienced warrior, and once enraged, he largely shrugs off their blows. And in his rage, he shows no mercy to them. Screaming wildly, he lays about him with his heavy maul, crushing bones and mashing flesh. 

In turn, the monks switch to their most dangerous, most lethal techniques. And when the battle is done, although Scotty is bruised and beaten, their new sorcerer ally lies on the cobbles of the street with his neck at an angle that is clearly not correct for his anatomy. 

“Gods damn it,” Scotty growls.

“Sad,” Drolc agrees. 

_*Next Time:*_ Oh all right, let's check in with Dzedz.


----------



## the Jester (Mar 12, 2019)

The shallow gasps change to a slow wheeze. Then there is a cough, followed by retching and a groan.

“At last!” cries Dzedz. “I thought your kind was tougher than that. You've been out for hours!”

“What... what happened?”

“We fell into a trap.”

“I remember that. And...” A pause. “Those tentacle monsters.”

“Yeah. I stopped them, but barely. And...” Dzedz pauses too, then continues mournfully. “It cost us.”

Slowly, the other struggles to his feet. He looks around at the bodies scattered about- monsters and companions both. “Did... did anyone else make it?”

Dzedz jerks a thumb at one of the motionless forms on the ground. “He's still unconscious, but Rorin made it.” He sighs. “It's just going to be the three of us, Carl Hungus.”

“How deep do you think we are?” the dragonborn asks.

Dzedz shrugs. “Deeper than we were ready to be, is my guess.”

***

Once Rorin regains consciousness, the three take stock of their situation. They have no idea how deep beneath Marble Hall they are, nor have they the slightest clue on how to escape. They only know one thing.  

“We have to go up.” Dzedz glances at his two companions. “We certainly can't just stay here. We're going to run out of food before too long.”

“We might be able to find stuff to eat down here,” Rorin replies. “Even goblin flesh is better than starving.”

Hungus makes a face. Dzedz snorts. “I'd rather eat stirges, but whatever.”

The three set off to explore. In short order they discover a bizarre and horrifying bedroom with art on the walls that straddles a weird line between pornography and edification of the dead. Emerging from a secret door come a stranger and more obscene group than our heroes (such as they are) could have anticipated- a group of creatures that can only be described as phallus-people. These walking phalli have arms and faces, wield maces fashioned into the lewdest of shapes, and demonstrate immediate hostile intent. Worse yet, they try to capture the trio of adventurers, intending to subject them to who knows what sort of terrifying abuse. 

But the three of them manage to slay the strange phallic folk; they aren't even very tough, although they do attempt to blind our heroes by spewing sticky goo in their eyes. It is unsettling and disgusting. 

“What kind of sick god made those, do you think?” comments Dzedz. It is, of course, intended as a rhetorical question.

Little does he realize that it is not only a good and relevent question, but one whose answer- and whose high priest- will haunt them.

Following the secret passage that the phallusians emerged from, the group finds a chamber manned by a mass of zombies. Too many zombies. 

Desperately, Carl Hungus blocks the entry to the secret passage as the undead shamble towards them. “I'll try to hold them off!” he shouts, and casts _protection from evil and good_. 

Dzedz and Rorin stay behind him, firing arrows and cantrips at the zombies, while Hungus makes a heroic last stand. The zombies crowd all around him, reaching for him, tearing at him- but the power of his god repels them. He strikes to the left with his maul, dropping one zombie, and another takes its place. He smashes it down in turn, then strikes to his right in the wake of an arrow's flight, hammering another zombie down. Another, and another... and another. All while their ripping claws can't seem to penetrate his guard, can't reach into the gaps between plates of his armor, can't defeat the holy defense that his god has lain about him. 

Finally, gasping in fear, Carl Hungus realizes that he has run out of foes to smite. 

“On the other hand,” Rorin says, kneeling down above one of the zombie corpses and drawing his knife, “we still don't know how to get out of here.”

“True.” Dzedz watches as Rorin begins to eviscerate the body. “What are you doing?”

“I'm checking them for treasure,” Rorin states. “What if one of them swallowed something?”

Dzed and Hungus exchange a glance. They are too weak to go on without the archer. 

“That's really gross,” Hungus grumbles.

“Just wait a few minutes.” Rorin moves to the second body. 

Thus did Rorin Ilmixie earn the moniker 'the Butcher of Fandelose'.

_*Next Time:*_ Hungus, Rorin, and Dzedz run into more trouble!


----------



## the Jester (Mar 13, 2019)

Drolc and Scotty awaken aching from the blows of the Pan Lung monks. They slept at Scotty's house, aware that they were in no shape for adventure. And yet... Drolc's dim mind ponders his missing friends. He wants to help, but... well... where are they?

Over breakfast and bean juice*, Scotty inquires, “Why the long face, Drolc?”

“Huh?” Drolc looks at him blankly.

“You look sad,” Scotty elaborates. 

“Oh. Sorry. Friends missing. Drolc wants to find.”

“Okay, sounds good. We'll see what we can do.”

Drolc rises, pushing his chair back. 

“After we finish breakfast,” Scotty expands. He takes a sip. “And our bean juice.”

***

The problem, it turns out, is that Drolc doesn't know where his friends are. That's why they are missing. He suspects strongly that they went out adventuring, but his dim mind overlooks the most obvious possibility- Marble Hall- and his lack of ability to communicate sophisticated ideas (such as “I have no idea where they are”) soon results in him leading Scotty on a wandering path following the river south of Fandelose. 

When they are accosted by a hungry bear, Drolc drives it off without difficulty. But no sign of his friends. 

Frowning, he continues to follow the river. 

Under the water, green eyes take note of the two adventurers. 

***

“For gods' sake. Would you freaking _hurry up?_”

“I don't want to miss anything,” Rorin objects, sawing open the gut of another zombie. 

Hungus heaves a sigh. 

“You never know,” Rorin adds. “I've heard stories.”

“Yeah, it might have treasure inside of it if it's a monster that eats people whole,” Dzedz grumbles. “But these are zombies.”

“You never know,” the Butcher of Fandelose repeats. 

***

Eventually, Rorin finishes with the grisly business of eviscerating the rotting intestines from the undead that the party defeated. It's a process that is both slow and foul-smelling. When he is done, his arms and the front of his body are coated in odoriferous black goop. 

“No luck,” he announces.

“That's really gross,” says Dzedz.

“He's saying that, and he's a dwarf,” Hungus points out. “I really don't think we should wait for you to do that again. Especially because you're not going to find anything.” 

“Hey, you get an even share of anything you find.”

“An even share of nothing, after an hour of stench,” replies Hungus.

“Fine. Don't wait around next time, and I'll keep whatever I find.”

“Let's just get moving,” Dzedz sighs.

They do, cautiously advancing into further unknown territory of the megadungeon. Before they have been moving for two minutes, they are ambushed by a pair of giant spiders, but the fangs of the monsters can't get through Hungus' and Dzedz's armor, and the adventurers put the beasts down in a few blows. Continuing along, they find a chamber that contains gigantic bats giving off ear-splitting shrieks, and shut the door and try a different direction.

The architecture is far rougher around here than they have seen previously; rather than the unnaturally smooth walls they have seen above, these caverns are rough-hewn. Some even appear to be a mix of pre-existing natural caves and rough stonework. Dzedz can't identify the authors of the architecture, but disdainfully notes, “It's crude work. Either it's rough because it was never finished, or it's just really half-assed.” Fungus grows plentifully, and here and there, water trickles down a wall or across the floor. 

“I bet all this fungus is what keeps these things down here fed,” Dzedz comments. “It could probably support a pretty big-”

At that point, a gang of eight figures comes into view. They are upright, humanoid in form, but feathered. There heads sport cruel beaks; they are obviously some sort of wingless bird.**

And they rush forward, squawking and tearing at the three hapless adventurers, who set out to defend themselves as best they can. Hungus' maul splatters bird brains about, while Dzedz casts _shocking pulse_ to deliver several small explosions that knock several of the bird-creatures from their feet. Rorin's arrows seems to grow from bird throats and breasts with remarkable speed. Soon, most of the birds are dead, and the remaining ones flee down an adjoining passageway.

“How's everybody doing?” asks Rorin. 

“Wounded,” Hungus says, wincing. “But standing.”

“Likewise,” Dzedz agrees. “I could use a short rest.”

The others agree. Hungus plants the head of his maul at his feet and leans against the wall with a sigh. The dwarf wizard sits down cross legged. Rorin keeps an eye out for trouble. Given a little time undisturbed, the three of them can regain a little steam and then continue looking for an egress point. 

Unfortunately, the bird folk don't give them the time. Seven of them find our heroes, and interrupt their attempt to rest rather dramatically, with loud screeches and a charge that sees Hungus forced to expend the last of his ability to _lay on hands_ to keep himself conscious. 

When the fight is over, Rorin cocks his head and declares, “There are more of them. I can hear them.” 

“We aren't going to get an hour.” Dzedz grimaces. 

The three have a quick discussion- try to hold this chamber (which has multiple entrances) against all comers, or find somewhere better to rest? There isn't a good option behind them; most of the places that they have passed through have had multiple ways in and out of them. 

“We need to keep looking for a way out,” Dzedz says. 

“If we run into more monsters, it could be trouble,” Hungus warns. “I'm pretty hurt already.”

“I'm not in the best shape, but if you can keep them off of me, I can keep blowing them up.”

Rorin says, “I'm in pretty good shape. I can tank for a while.” He draws his sword. “I'm not as good in the front as I am with a bow, but I should be good enough.”

“All right. I guess I'll back you up, then.” Hungus grips his maul. 

“And I'll take the rear.” Dzedz assumes his position. 

They advance again- and to their relief, they soon find a stairway heading up.

*** 

“Hello there.” 

The dwarf hasn't drawn his axe, but his hand is near it. 

“Uh, hello,” says Scotty.

“Friend?” Drolc asks hopefully. 

The dwarf looks at them dubiously. Scotty and Drolc are pretty rough-looking. They just emerged from the shrubbery along the riverside, pushing their way into his small (and relatively hidden) camp. On top of that, one of them is a half-orc. 

“We intend you no harm,” Scotty says, holding his open hands out. “We didn't know you were here. Sorry.”

“All right,” the dwarf shrugs, letting his hand drop away from the handle of his weapon. “No harm done.” He squints at them, keeping his gaze on Drolc for a few extra moments.”

“Drolc be friend,” Drolc says. Then his jabs his thumb at his chest and repeats, “Drolc.”

“Kriv,” the dwarf answers, pointing to himself. 

“And I'm Scotty- Scotty Beandelver.”

The dwarf nods curtly, continuing to appraise them with his eyes. “From the looks of you, I take it you're adventurers.”

“Looking for friends,” Drolc says. 

Kriv frowns. “Friends?”

Scotty elaborates, “His adventuring companions are missing. I guess he thinks they're out here or something?”

“Well, there's nothing out here but-” Kriv is interrupted by splashing.

And then a voice, mellifluous and sweet, like running water. “Oh please, help!”

_*Next Time:*_ Things don't go so well!


*Coffee, if you don't already know that.

**Dire corbies, from the 1e Fiend Folio, for the record.


----------



## the Jester (Mar 17, 2019)

As a lad, Scotty Beandelver had once played a prank that went quite wrong, leading him to a terror-filled escape across the rooftops with a pair of guard drakes hissing and scrambling after him. But the rooftops are the criminals' road, and Scotty inadvertently interrupted a Grey Brother mid-assassination with his frantic flight, leading the assassin to join the pursuit. Hot panic had risen in Scotty's young throat, and only his slight frame had allowed him to escape by wiggling through the narrow slats of a fence. The drakes pulled up short of the fence, snapping and tearing at it in rage, while the assassin slid to a halt behind them, cursing and deciding that it was better to let the kid go than to kill someone's drakes in order to continue the pursuit. After all, that would just draw more attention, and attention was an assassin's worst enemy.  

So Scotty got away after a half-hour long chase, lungs burning, blood singing. The escapade had taught him a very important lesson, although a wiser individual might have learnt a different one. But the lesson that Scotty learned that day was, _I can get away with anything!_

A few years later, while Scotty was still a boy but old enough to understand the gravity of the situation, his mother fell ill. Slowly she dried up and withered, sinking into herself like a raisin. The physickers could do nothing; the priests only shook their head and offered early condolences while trying to cultivate reverence in the boy. But when she lay on the brink of death, Scotty's mother made a miraculous recovery, and she lived for another six years before finally dying in an accident involving a herd of giant goats. But her survival taught Scotty another lesson: _Everything works out._ Her later death did not dissuade him from this opinion, though if he had been at an age where things between his mother and he were less contentious, it might have.

Together, these two formative incidents left Scotty Beandelver with an entirely unrealistic and unwarranted optimism.

***

Water streams from the green figure's face, suggestive of tears. But it's just the river, pouring from the slight creature as it rises up, pulling itself up the banks by the grass and brambles alongside. It cries out, “I mean you no harm,” before repeating, “Please, help me!”

Kriv draws an axe out, but Drolc strides forward and extends a hand, helping the small stranger up. It has slightly elfin features, with webs of skin between its fingers and toes. Thin light blue hair is plastered to its scalp by the water, and a few bits of debris are tangled in the hair. The figure is naked, androgynous in form but for its genitalia, which reveal it to be male.

“What are you?” Kriv asks. The suspicion in his voice is plain.

“My name is Softscale.” He looks at the three adventurers desperately. “I am a nixie. Please- my folk need help! They are being terrorized by horrible monsters!”

“What kind of monsters?” Scotty inquires.

“We call them the dark ones,” Softscale replies. “They're so mean! And hungry! And they eat us!”

“We help,” Drolc declares. His mind is weak, but his moral compass is strong. If there's one thing the dull-witted half-orc knows, it's that when he encounters someone in need- he helps. 

Kriv scowls. “'Dark ones', he says. Not very descriptive, is he? And where are these dark ones, anyway? In the water, I'll bet.”

“Yes!” Softscale exclaims. “They live in the river!”

“Shouldn't be a problem for us,” Scotty says confidently. 

***

The city of Fandelose, despite its precarious situation, often rings with music. There are many would-be entertainers to be found, either playing in the cafes or taverns of the city, entertaining strangers at the parks, or even playing for friends in their own homes. It's not hard for such folk to find work, albeit usually short-term work. Sometimes, when someone is having a particularly exciting party or event, they will even hire more than one entertainer- sometimes a whole group, either to play together or to compete against one another. 

The better-paying jobs usually involve more demanding performances, more talented performers, or more difficult or dangerous locations. And every once in a while, a performer or group of performers might be hired to do something truly unusual. 

Thus it is that Durnithio, well-known entertainer and Lothario, has recruited two of the city's other bards to join him. He has chosen the gravel-voiced tiefling Morsado and the sweet-voiced halfling Featherbender Bix, knowing that their voices can harmonize with and compliment his own. And for this job, Durnithio knows, success is vital. Should the three of them put on a successful performance, the pay might be- well. Good enough to be, frankly, unreasonable. But on the other hand, should they fail to amuse, their hosts might not only not pay them the agreed fee, but might actually take them hostage or worse. 

Not long after the three of them exit the city gates, heading south toward the Black Gorge, a cloaked figure slides into view, emerging from the rocks along the edge of the path. “You're Durnithio?” 

“That's right,” the bard says, voice high and strong. “And these are my two assistants for the night!”

The figure throws off its hood to reveal an orcish face, studying the three of them. After a moment, the orc nods decisively. “All right, follow me.”

Thus do the three bards enter the megadungeon beneath Marble Hall. The orc escorts them through a bewildering series of passages and rooms, sometimes making them freeze silently for a few moments while some monster or other stalks past, and down a flight of stairs, through more chambers, down more stairs, until the three of them are thoroughly lost. 

Lost, but surrounded by shouting orcs demanding entertainment.

***

Deeper still, Carl Hungus, Rorin Ilmixie, and Dzedz Orcslayer make a careful ascension up the stairs. They don't find the easy way out that they were all praying for; instead, they find more trouble. Giant rats, giant frogs, stirges- they fight their increasingly-wounded way through them all. 

“I don't know about this,” Hungus whines as he binds his freshest injuries. “I'm not sure how much more of this I can handle.” 

“It would be nice if we could find a place to rest up,” Dzedz says, “but the day's young yet. We would have to be somewhere safe, and we'd need a good long while undisturbed before it would be time to go to sleep.”

Rorin looks up from the bloody business of eviscerating giant rats. “On the bright side, we can probably eat some of what we've killed. Rats and stirges tend to be full of disease, but giant frogs should be safe. And they'll cook up quite nicely.”

Hugus grimaces. 

“On the other hand,” the Butcher of Fandelose continues, “the longer we stay down here, the more danger we are exposed to.”

Dzedz grunts. “If we knew our way out, a hard run upward would be the thing to do. But we don't. We can't really shorten our time down here.”

“We can if we use more than an hour or two of the day to try to find our way out.”

“But we're also more likely to get ourselves killed,” Hungus protests. “What if we stick to areas we have cleared out?”

“We haven't cleared out any areas, just a few rooms,” Dzedz answers, “and I'm not confident that we can.”

“Also,” Rorin points out, “quite a few of the monsters we've been encountering don't seem like they stick to one area.”

Dzedz nods. “True enough. It's well known to my people that monsters wander.”

The dragonborn speaks up again. “Well, we have to do something. We're all wounded, and we have really limited healing capacity between us. I really think we should hole up somewhere.”

But there is nowhere to hole up that they feel is safe; or at least, not without backtracking- and heading deeper down into the dungeon again. Which is a prospect that is not just daunting, but potentially lethal. 

So, despite all three of them being out of spells and running ragged, they do the only thing that they can- they continue looking for a way up.

***

“Underwater!” Kriv exclaims. “You're insane!” He eyes the flowing river with trepidation. 

“Nah, we'll be fine,” Scotty promises.

“We help,” Drolc repeats. 

“Thank you! Oh, thank you!” Softscale is beside himself, nearly weeping in gratitude. As Drolc starts to clamber down the bank to the water's edge, the nixie says, “I can help you help me. I can let you breathe the water for a time.”

“Perfect!” Scotty exclaims. He starts to follow Drolc, then glances up at Kriv. “Well? Come on, surely you aren't afraid of a little water! Especially when our friend can make it so we won't drown.”

“I'm not afraid.” Kriv bridles. “But we dwarves know about the dangers of water.”

“Oh, please,” Softscale begs. “The dark ones are powerful! Without your help, mighty dwarf, your friends might perish.”

Kriv grunts a curse, then slowly begins to stomp down the bank towards them. When he finally, reluctantly, joins his newfound friends, Softscale closes his eyes and begins to whisper strange words, brushing his webbed hands over the three adventurers and imparting _water breathing_ to them. 

“Let's go!” Scotty cries. He dives in.

“Follow me. I will guide you.” The nixie steps into the river and immediately drops below the surface.

Kriv curses again as Scotty submerges and Drolc heaves himself into the water. “This is a terrible idea! Everybody knows that the water doesn't like to let go of those it catches!” But nobody else is above the surface; nobody else can hear him. “Crap!” he shouts, then throws himself into the stream.

***

Hours of singing and playing have passed. The orcs have been properly entertained. The feast is done; the drinks have been drunk, the drugs ingested; the copulating couples have gone off to private places to copulate. 

Durnithio mutters, “That went well.” The orc guiding him out gestures at a shaft leading up. 

“That way leads out.” 

“My thanks,” says the bard. “It was good doing business with you. Any time your people need a bard, send word to me.”

The orc gives a curt nod, then turns to make his way back to the sublevel of the dungeon that his folk control. Durnithio, meanwhile, begins his ascent.

But wait! You ask. Where are Durnithio's companions? What happened to Morsado and Bix? Why are they not leaving, too?

The answer is simple: a purse split three ways is far less rewarding than the entire purse. Durnithio has, in one fell swoop and with the slightest amount of aid from orcish narcotics slipped into his erstwhile companions' drinks, not only tripled his price, but also eliminated two potential rivals from the scene. Indeed, he chuckles silently, Morsado and Bix had shown themselves to have quite complimentary styles and voices. Should they work together, they might even one day supplant Durnithio's reputation as the finest bard in the Bronze District. 

_Well, no need to worry about that now. They will awaken to find themselves lost in the depths of Marble Hall. If they survive, excellent, I was so worried about you gentlemen after you wandered off, but I was too drunk to etcetera, etcetera. And if not... well! Good-bye, my fine fellows, and I'll mourn your loss. Alas for all those poor taverns that will need to hire new entertainment, but perhaps they'll be willing to spend a bit more to put a truly exceptional talent before their crowds..._

_*Next Time:*_ Three groups, all of them in trouble! At least one of them won't make it out alive!


----------



## the Jester (Mar 19, 2019)

The first thing Bix becomes aware of is the pounding in his head. He's an experienced drinker and has had his share of hangovers, but this... _this..._

Bix knows that a hangover can be bad. It can grip your head in a pulsing vice; it can punch you in the stomach over and over again. It can make it so you can barely walk, see, and hear. It can leave you exhausted and feeling filthy, like a wrung-out rag. Yet as awful as it can be, something about _this_ feels different. It lacks some distinctive queasy characteristic common to hangovers, and instead makes him feel as if... as if...

“We were drugged,” he groans. He takes in the area around him- it's underground, clearly still in the dungeon, overgrown with mold and fungus. He can't see much in the gloom, so he digs in his pack- thank the gods he still has that!- and pulls out his lantern. Once he can see a little better, he notes the still form lying in the weird growth nearby and shakes Morsado awake. “Hey! We were drugged!”

The tiefling groans and sits up, then immediately leans to his left and vomits. 

“I don't know about you, but I didn't drink that much.” Bix frowns. “Where's Durnithio?”

Wiping his mouth, Morsado says, “Who do you think drugged us?”

“What do you- what, Durnithio?”

“That bastard. He probably thought that he could keep all the money and eliminate some o fhis competition in one fell swoop.”

Bix stares at him for a moment.

“Where the hell are we?” Morsado asks. 

“I think we're still in Marble Hall.”

“That's not good.” 

Both of them are starting to feel a little better; the aftereffects of whatever their rival used to knock them out clear quickly. So they elect to wait a few minutes, then try to find a way to exit the dungeon. 

And then they hear a loud, frightening, wordless shout booms out somewhere in the darkness not too far away.

***

Below the water, everything is green. Softscale swims from Kriv to Drolc to Scotty, brushing a webbed hand along each of their necks, and announces, “You can breathe, now. Follow me!”

The nixie swims off, and the three follow, with Scotty swimming and the others two trudging along the river's bottom, underwater vegetation swirling around their calves, mud rising in their wake only to be carried past them by the current. The underwater environment seems slow-moving and eerie.

Soon their guide takes them to a rocky slab lying on the bottom with a crack in the middle of it. “Through there,” Softscale whispers. “That's where the dark ones are.”

“What are these dark ones, anyway?” asks Kriv, but Drolc is already pulling himself through the opening, Scotty swift behind him. The dwarf utters a curse and follows. 

Behind them, Softscale wrings his hands.

***

“We're almost out of torches,” Rorin says. 

Dzedz shrugs. “It doesn't matter. I have darkvision.”

“Yeah,” Hungus objects, “but neither of us do.”

“I can guide you guys.”

“What if we have to fight?”

Dzedz scowls. “I guess I should have learned the _light_ cantrip, but who'd have thought a dwarf would need it?”

The three trapped adventurers continue to move along the halls and passages of the dungeon. They still have no idea how to find their way out or how deep they are. Every squeak in the distance makes them tense up, fearing another flock of stirges or pack of giant rats. 

“I wonder how far down this place goes,” mutters the dwarven wizard. 

Hugus shrugs. “I don't think anybody knows.”

“Who do you suppose built it?” Rorin asks. 

Dzedz shakes his head. “I can't tell. The work down below was rough and primitive, but the stuff up above is so smooth, without braces or butresses, that it almost seems to break the principles of architecture. Whatever clever techniques the builders up there used, they're beyond even my folk.”

Dzedz leaves unsaid how rare it is that a dwarf can't recognize architecture. Was magic involved in keeping the halls, some of them quite immense, from collapsing under their own weight? Or does some folk possess a deeper stonecunning than the dwarves?

It's a mystery that will have to wait, as more squeaking comes from the darkness ahead. The party tenses; at least whatever is making the noises is at floor level. It's probably not stirges.

Then red, beady eyes come into view. More and more of them. 

“Giant rats!” Rorin yells. 

The vermin come rushing out of the dark at the beleagured trio. 

***

“What the hell was that?” hisses Bix. 

“I have no idea.” Morsado fingers the neck of his lute. “Either trouble or help.”

“What kind of help are we going to find down here?”

“Adventurers. Dwarves. Maybe even orcs.”

“Orcs!”

“We did just perform for them.”

“And ended up here! Left for dead!”

“But not dead. Besides, I don't think that was the orcs. Or at least, not all of them. Durnithio might have paid a few of them off to help dump us, but on the whole, they know that if word gets out that bards who go to entertain them never come back, nobody else will come down here for them again. And it's not like their folk are any good, musically.”

“And as we saw, they do like a good party.” Bix nods. “All right. So- move toward the noise?”

Morsado nods, and the two of them creep toward the source of the yell. 

***

Beneath the crack is a dim chamber, the water filling it hazy with mud. An opening at the far end leads deeper in, and Drolc pushes himself through it without hesitation. His two companions follow quick on his heels.

The dark ones' champion lies beyond. 

It is like a dark, distorted reflection of a mermaid, with a piscine lower body and an upper half that is roughly, but only roughly, that of a humanoid. Its thick arms bulge, clutching a long, wickedly barbed harpoon. It turns as the three would-be heroes enter. 

Drolc is upon it, swinging his greatsword through the water. But water is thicker than air; he doesn't expect the resistance that it puts against his attack, and the dark one swims nimbly out of the arc of his weapon. 

And then Kriv and Scotty reach it, and an intense battle develops. 

None of the three adventurers has the proper type of weapon for this fight. The dark one, on the other hand, is perfectly suited to fighting underwater. It stabs one of them, then another, then the third, wounding all of them. They fight back; several blows land, and Kriv uses his _action surge_ to land another. 

But the dark one is tough and tenacious. Though bleeding from several cuts and bruised from Scotty's blows, it stabs Kriv violently, and the tip of its harpoon pierces the dwarf's lung. “Aagh!” he cries, the water near him rapidly changing color, and the dark one rips the harpoon free. Kriv shrieks, and the monster lashes out, grabbing him by the throat and holding him in place as his thrashing subsides. Finally, the dwarf goes limp.

“Kriv!” cries Drolc, and delivers a terrific blow. There is a flash of silver light as the half-orc smites the dark one, and the monster staggers, barely still conscious. 

Then it swings the butt end of its harpoon around, catching Drolc alongside the chin. Drolc reels, seeing stars, and then a great pain runs all the way through his chest and out his back. 

Already terrifically wounded, Scotty Beandelver considers making his escape while the dark one is busy tearing his two friends to pieces. But he has always, since the days of his youth, possessed an unreasonable level of optimism. He has always been sure that things will work out for him. So instead of taking to his metaphorical heels, Scotty swims in to finish the dark one champion off.

It is the last time that Scotty feels optimistic. In fact, it's the last time that he feels anything at all.

***

Rorin shoots a rat, but the pack has already almost reached them. 

Dzedz rushes forward and casts a _prestidigitation_, shouting as loud as he can and using the cantrip to amplify it. The sound reverberates down the hall, terrifying the rats. They scatter and retreat. 

“Good move!” Rorin says. “There were enough of them that they might have overrun us.” 

They start to continue down the hallway, but a door down the way opens. Immediately, they strike defensive poses.

“Oh thank the gods,” comes a voice. Two people, and halfling and a tiefling, step into view. Both are dressed for a party, though both look as though they've already finished partying and it was a rough one. 

“Uh, hello,” says Hungus. 

“We're lost,” the tiefling states. “We could use a hand finding our way out of here.”

There is a long silence. Then Dzedz responds, “You and us both, pal.”


----------



## the Jester (Mar 25, 2019)

Fandelose is a smoky, sooty city. The firestone lamps and furnaces at work constantly shed thick fumes when alight, staining walls and clothes alike in the city. 

Near the city gates and posted at various points throughout the Lower District, posters cry out the names of missing persons while a ragged-looking evil preacher persuades more victims to join his vile cult. Elsewhere, a crowd of shouting farmers demonstrates outside the Bank of Fandelose, protesting predatory lending practices, protesting the military government that rules the city, protesting their increasing enserfment. 

At the Breach, cursing artificers go over their math again and again, trying to figure out what caused the latest collapse. The hole in the city's wall that leaves it vulnerable to forces assailing it from outside won't fix itself, and the longer it remains, the worse the artificers look.

Meanwhile, outside the city, scouts from the hobgoblin remnant army called the Scarlet Fist creep close enough to observe the city's status. The Fist extorts an extraordinary amount of tribute from Fandelose each spring as a bribe not to sack the city. Though the Six Fingered Hand has fallen, the Scarlet Fist carries a piece of its legacy; its general, Heshwat the Younger, is the son of one of the Six Fingered Hand's infamous leaders, Heshwat the Eviscerator. 

In the central citadel of Fandelose, Argos Otto receives briefings about the many threats facing his city. From the Scarlet Fist to a new tribe of lizard folk that seem to have moved into the forest to the southeast, from the giants that occasionally raid the city from somewhere in the hills to the northwest to the numerous griffons that sometimes attack groups outside the walls, he knows just how many problems face his people from without. Likewise, he knows about the troubles within the walls, from the disturbing possibility that there is a traitor amongst the Artificers' Guild to the unrest over the new coinage, from the rising violence committed by the city's gangs to the escalating tensions with the farmers... yes, he has plenty to keep him busy.

Elsewhere in the citadel, a soldier gets off duty and leaves the barracks to go to a tavern. But his route takes him into a back alley, and when he emerges, he no longer looks the same. He is but one of a whole secret second society that lives in hiding among the city's inhabitants.

Our city, the final city, _Urbis Ultimate_, is troubled. 

***

In the megadungeon, a stroke of luck at last for the lost adventurers: another ascending staircase. It ends in a chamber guarded bya group of orcs and a guard drake. Hungus, in the lead, pulls up short and calls out soothing words in Draconic, trying to prevent the drake from attacking. 

“Hey!” Bix calls. “We don't want any trouble! We just want to get out of here!”

“Remember us?” Morsado cries. “We just played your guys' party!”

The orcs rein in the drake. Tensions ease as it becomes apparent that they mean no harm to the party, especially to the two bards. “What happened? I thought you guys went home. And where's the other guy?”

“Yeah, good question,” Morsado responds. “Hey, I don't suppose you can point us at the way out of here?”

***

And thus, in short order, the party emerges from the dungeon at last. Blinking in the sunlight that is the first that they've seen in days, they all cheer raggedly. 

“Time to get back home,” Hungus declares. 

The group returns to the city.

***

It is most of a week before they overcome their trepidation and mount another expedition into the dungeon. Those who survived the harrowing trap are torn between trepidation about returning into Marble Hall and the fact that there is massive loot to be had down there- if only they can find it. 

Since they spend money like adventurers, buying rounds for everyone in the bar and such like, the siren call of loot soon wins out. 

This time, the party consists of Hungus, Morsado, Bix, Rorin, Mad Max, and Sarec, plus a new fellow who the others met during one of their nights of carousing: Jahsiven. (Mad Max recruited him after discovering that they share an interest in fine pipe weed.) 

This time the party goes back to the elevator and takes it all the way down. Morsado and Bix are once more able to talk the party's way past the orcs that guard the intermediate level with a meager bribe, allowing them to descend unopposed. Soon they arrive at the bottom; a single door offers egress from the chamber that the elevator has descended into. Much like the first area past the dwarf-works above, the walls are of uncannily smooth stone, without braces or buttressing. 

Heedless of danger, Sarec throws the door open. 

“Careful there!” warns Bix. 

The door opens onto a hallway, 15' wide and 20' high. It leads into the darkness, past the light from his torch. The group jostles into some kind of marching order and then advances, soon reaching a four-way intersection. First they head right, quickly entering a very large chamber that opens up in all directions. Its floor is tiled in 8' squares of marble, many cracked and broken. Two great rows of pillars runs down the sides of the chamber, carved and painted to resemble great pillars made of coins, gems and other treasure. 

“I like the décor,” comments Jahsiven.

On the other side, nearly 100' from the entrance, another wide hallway, this one a full thirty feet in width and braced by two more rows of similarly-decorated pillars, leads out.

“The pillars make me hopeful,” says Hungus. 

“Does this look familiar to you?” mutters Mad Max. 

As they head down the hallway, a flight of stirges suddenly bursts into action from where it was roosting on the ceiling. The hungry little beasts swarm over the party.

“Gah! I hate these things!” shouts Hungus. He rushes forward, away from them, and stumbled out onto the beach fronting an underground river. The bones of Vicious Toby have almost been completely stripped of their flesh; several giant crabs are feasting, but now, drawn by Hungus' movement, they engage the party from the other side. 

The party falls back with Hungus, and Morsado creates a _cloud of daggers_ behind them, chopping several stirges into bits. Once there is a barrier preventing the party from being attacked by everything at once, it only takes a moment for them to gain the advantage. The crabs are crushed beneath the weapons of Sarec, Mad Max, and Hungus, and Rorin's arrows and Morsado's spell soon dispose of the stirges. 

“Well done,” says Hungus. “Hey, does this look familiar? Have we maybe been here before?”

Rorin kneels down above one of the crabs, drawing his dagger.

“Really?” Hungus rolls his eyes. “Are you going to do the stirges, too?”

“You never know what you'll find,” retorts Rorin.

“What's he doing?” asks Jahsiven.

“This,” sighs Bix, “is why they call him the Butcher of Fandelose.”

***

Moving further in, past the shallow river and into the network of caves on the other side, the party almost immediately runs into a massive group of little hairy gibbering creatures- humanoids, but behaving animalistically, swarming over each other and snapping almost mindlessly with their teeth.

“I think I remember these guys,” Hungus exclaims, as the tide washes over the party. 

The gibberlings are easily dispatched individually; but the first group of them the party encounters numbers 17. That alone presents a problem. Fortunately, Morsado utilizes his _cloud of daggers_ again, whittling the enemy numbers down, while the others put up a staunch offense that lays the foe low very quickly. Still, they suffer a few cuts and bruises from the fight. 

But as they continue to explore the network of natural caves, they find more and more groups of gibberlings- some numbering only a half dozen, but others substantially greater. They find a mass of the monsters swarming hungrily over the corpse of a triceratops. The great numbers involve find the party pressed to the limit; only the fact that Bix, Hungus, Morsado, Jahsiven, and Rorin all have some healing magic allows them to keep going after that battle. 

And that's when they come into the vast chamber filled with gibberlings. 

If they thought the last battle pushed them to their limits, this one is even worse. Only the fact that the chamber the battle takes place in is huge, meaning many of the gibberlings need a few rounds to join the fight, prevents numbers from turning the tide in their favor. 

When the fight is finally over and they count the corpses, they find that they have slain 36 gibberlings. 

“All right!” exclaims Mad Max. “Did you guys see that? We're bad ass! We're not to be trifled with!”

“I'm just glad that I lived through that,” Bix gasps. 

“Are you kidding? We destroyed those guys!”

“But,” Rorin says, “it could have gone either way.”

“Hey!” calls Morsado from one end of the cave. “Come look over here!”

It turns out that Morsado has discovered a large shaft leading straight down. The air coming up from it stinks, and the sides of the shaft are filthy and streaked with dung. It's too sheer to climb.

“Well, that's interesting,” remarks Rorin. He tosses a torch down the shaft. It lands about 50' below. Rorin can see that there's an open space at the bottom. “Looks like it drops into a room.” 

A gnoll darts into view, grabs up the torch, and darts back out of view. Then the torch's light goes out. 

“There are gnolls down there,” the ranger continues. 

“Maybe we should come back to this later,” suggests Jahsiven. “Do we really want to go any further down? We don't really know how far down we are as it is.”

“That's a good point,” says Bix.

“That _is_ a good point,” Hungus agrees.

“Aw, come on, you guys,” Mad Max wheedles.

Sarec looks hopeful. 

“Let's finish checking out this level first,” Morsado says. “We can always come back- this shaft isn't going anywhere.”

Mad Max and Sarec reluctantly agree. 

The group continues exploring the caverns around the river, exterminating several smaller groups of gibberlings as they go. Most of the areas are largely unremarkable, and there is a notable dearth of treasure. 

Then they find a weird idol. Suggestive of a humanoid frog, it is streaked, multicolored. It appears to be a type of stone distinct from that of the cavern around it.

“That's weird,” says Mad Max. “Kind of creepy. I don't think I like it.”

Sarec nods. “I agree.”

Mad Max puts his hands on the altar and tries to push it over without success. But then he steps away from it. “I feel funny,” he says. “Is... what's happening?”

The others stare dumbfounded. 

“Ow! It itches! It...” Mad Max scrabbles at his breeches. There is something swelling beneath them. 

Bix covers his eyes. “Is that his-” 

Then the swelling grows immensely, ripping free of his pants in an explosion of cloth.

Mad Max has just grown a third leg. 

_*Next Time:*_ A fateful day for Mad Max!


----------



## the Jester (Mar 25, 2019)

“GAH!!!” Mad Max howls, fingers digging intSar the thigh of his third leg. “What is this thing?? Get it off of me!” The new leg kicks alongside his others, and Mad Max falls to the floor as he loses his balance. 

“But it's your leg,” says Morsado. 

“It's not- it's not my leg...” Mad Max groans in confusion.

Sarec pokes a finger into the new leg. “Can you feel that?”

“Of course I can feel that, it's my leg!” Mad Max gives a moan of despair. “What's happening to me? I'm a freak! I can't go on like this!”

“Why not?” Hungus asks. “It should make you more stable.”

“Are you crazy?” he splutters. “I have to get rid of this thing!”

The others try to convince Max to stay the course, but to no avail. He won't listen. Instead, he declares that he will return to the city and try to get help, perhaps from the Black Temple, whether the others come with him or not.

“You could die on your way out if you go alone,” Bix points out. 

“I don't care! My leg!”

“Fine,” Sarec says. “We'll go back to the city, at least for now.”

***

Mad Max is a soldier in the army. When the party reaches the city gates, the guards on duty know him- and are shocked to see his new extra limb. For his part, Max is embarrassed, ashamed, and tongue-tied on the subject, and just rushes the party through the checkpoint without talking about what happened, despite the questions of his fellow soldiers. 

Upon returning to the city, the adventurers head to the Black Temple, home to the priesthood of Vandreu the Townsaver in the hopes that the high priest there might be able to do something about Mad Max's third leg. “Maybe a _remove curse_ or something,” muses Morsado. He shakes his head in consternation. “I really don't know what will work.” 

The black priests agree to try in return for the party's help monitoring an upcoming protest. The farmers are marching in four days, demonstrating against the law that prevents them or their children from leaving their farms for other work. With the way tempers have been running lately in the city, the potential for violence is high. Nobody wants to see another riot. The damage to property and citizens alike would be terrible, and might force a major crackdown by the army. If that were to happen, who knows where it would lead? Nobody wins when the city fights itself. 

“Watch for an elven agitator with white hair,” the priest says. “If you see him, don't engage, but watch him. Let us know what he does and says. On the subject of the leg, though, I must warn you, I don't know if we will have any success.”

Mad Max moans in despair.

“Do what you can,” Rorin says. “We'll help with the protest either way.”

The priest is right: their efforts amount to nothing. “The touch of Chaos is permanent,” their patriarch remarks dolefully.

***

Mad Max hurries away alone. For the next few days he shuns his friends and duties. He tries to work up the nerve to sever the leg himself, but he can't do it. He just can't. Despite everything, it _is_ his leg.

He learns to walk on it, to run with it. He has his clothes refitted to accommodate it. He returns to work and files a report to explain his absence. He is upbraided by his superiors, but hardly hears them. His only solace is in drink and smoke. This new leg, his or not, is profoundly unnatural, and he doesn't know if he will ever get to used it. 

He is a freak.

***

“All right, listen up!” the sergeant shouts. “The damn farmers are marching again! They're planning on coming across the bridge and into the Bronze District, and by Holthro's fist, they are a bunch of envious, venal bastards! There are a lot of nice homes and businesses packed with valuables on their route, and we all know how much they like to break windows and set fires! So our job is to make sure they don't cause any trouble!”

Mad Max doesn't really listen. He marches alongside his brethren, but he can't focus. He's half-drunk and very stoned. And he is a three-legged freak. 

***

The city's Upper District is sometimes derisively referred to as the Rice District these days. During the war, it was converted into large rice fields in order to feed the city. Cut perpendicular to the river, canals water the rice, and roads snake around them. 

At the moment, one of these roads is filled with a throng of singing, shouting, marching people. The city's farmers, or at least several thousand of them, are on the move. Seen from above, it is like an army of ants entering a river as one, forming a single squirming communal mass that slowly extends itself like a salient, crossing the bridge that leads toward the Bronze District, which is the city's center, home to the army's citadel, to the banks, to the rich. 

A mass of soldiers awaits them, grim, threatening. The air is heavy with the threat of spilled blood. Spectators fill the roadsides, filled with that strange eagerness to see things go horribly wrong that almost inevitably grips bystanders at times like this.

In the crowd, Bluebeard awaits his target. 

***

The tread of the farmers grows louder as the bridge fills with them. The clouds above are like faces staring down with furrowed brows and angry cheeks. In the vanguard of the mob is a rabble-rousing farmer who constantly shouts enflaming words. “We're not going to take it any more!” and “We have rights!” and “The army must give up its power!” A cart laden with sacks of rotting tomatoes and apples follows close behind him, two old women distributing the fruit as they go.

On the street not far ahead of the rabble-rouser, an uneasy Carl Hungus turns to Morsado, Bix, and Rorin. “I don't like this. I don't know how we're supposed to keep violence from happening, especially if Farmer John there won't shut up.”

“We could ask him to shut up,” Bix suggests.

“Are you kidding?” Rorin gestures at the farmers pressed around them. “We'd get torn apart. This is not a good scene.” He looks up at the surrounding buildings. “If the protest wasn't moving, I'd take to the rooftops, but there's no point unless the farmers hold still.”

The rabble rouser is exhorting the farmers to stand up for themselves, to refuse to let the military intimidate them. The farmers are bristling. The soldiers are growing angry. The crowd is starting to grow feverish with anticipation. The tension in the air is palpable; it can be smelled, and the aroma grows stronger as the front of the mass of farmers reaches the Bank of Fandelose.

Bix nudges his companions. “Look over there, in the farmers. Near the bank's left wall.”

He has spotted a white-haired elf.

***

Bluebeard scans the crowd. 

_There!_ 

Bluebeard is a Grey Brother- an assassin. He is here, in this throng, for a reason. He pushes his way through it and moves in closer to his target. He surreptitiously draws a dagger.

The mood is growing fouler still. He takes a moment to assess the farmers, the soldiers, the crowd. The first rotten tomato flies. _This is going to turn into a riot any minute,_ he thinks. _I'll make my move when it does._

***

The tomato splatters off the shield of a soldier. She grimaces but doesn't respond. Then more tomatoes begin to fly, pelting them. 

Mad Max is roused from his reverie when a squishy apple splatters against his breastplate. “Who did that?” he roars, and rushes toward the farmers. 

He is the first soldier to break ranks. A sergeant yells something at him, but it is lost in the noise of the protest. Mad Max brings out his axe. 

“Oh no,” cries Hungus. He shouts, “Don't do it, Max!”

Heedless of anything, Mad Max charges the farmer who threw the apple at him and, in a single mighty blow, decapitates him. The blow carries through, cutting into the person next to the farmer-

A child. A boy of ten.

In a spray of blood, the child falls. 

Mad Max draws back in horror, shocked. The mob explodes in anger. The discipline of the army begins to disintegrate.

Bluebeard makes his move.

***

Afterward, after the farmers have been bloodied and broken and driven back to the Upper District, a dozen bodies lay in the streets. The city is in shock. 

Mad Max is thrown into the Black Tower, awaiting trial. 

Hungus, Bix, and Morsado lost track of the white haired elf. 

A whistling Bluebeard collects his fee and returns to the Anthill Apartments to bask in the praise of his Uncle. 

_*Next Time:*_ Hungus sets out after the Hacker again!


----------



## the Jester (Mar 26, 2019)

In the aftermath of the riot, the city hunkers down. The White Battlet triples the number of patrols it runs and increases the number of soldiers in each patrolling group. The farmers lock themselves in their homes. The gangs minimize their street presence. Everybody knows that the army's patience is as thin as the toe in a well-worn stocking.

Cafes and taverns are only lightly populated. In time, things will return to normal- surely they will- but for a few days, the Army is intolerant of troublemaking of any kind. Summary justice is the order of the day. Even the city's central market is quiet. 

***

“I can't believe Mad Max did that,” Hungus sighs. 

“I know what you mean.” Bix shakes his head and takes a drink. The events of the previous day still spin round and round in his head. “He murdered a kid!”

Rorin shivers. “I think that gaining a third leg must have driven him crazy.”

“Look at that!” Morsado barks a gravelly laugh. “Even the Butcher of Fandelose is distubed!”

Hungus finishes his beer and orders another. As quiet as the city is, they have the brewery almost to themselves. “There's nothing that we can do for him now anyway. And even if there was, should we? He straight up murdered that child.”

Morsado tugs at his beard. “What do you think the army is gonna do with him?”

“I don't know. Execute him? Lock him up for the rest of his life? Exile him?”

The four of them fall into a deep, brooding silence. This ends when the door to the brewery opens and a man walks in dressed in the raiment of a Pan Lung monk. Taking in the meager company available in the place, after a moment, he approaches the adventurers. 

“Hello,” says Hungus warily.

“Greetings!” the stranger replies. “You look like adventurers.”

Morsado shrugs. “That we are, at least from time to time.”

“I am Krillan the Chronic. I am a monk of the Pan Lung School, and I seek to test my skills in the world!” He pulls out a pipe and begins packing it. “My masters wish me to seek adventure, so I'm looking for companions.”

“It is a dangerous world out there.” Bix nods. “As it turns out, we just lost a companion.”

“Oh? Did he die fighting some monster?”

“Not exactly...”

“What my friend is saying,” Hungus declares, “is that we have room for one more.”

“Excellent!” exclaims Krillan, and hands his pipe to Carl Hungus. “Care to smoke?”*

***

Once they are all good and buzzed, the party, including their new friend Krillan, strikes out for Red Bank. Red Bank is a small village about 12 miles north of Fandelose. Its existence is contentious; the resources required to keep it safe are greater than any value Red Bank has to the city, since it is a ripe target for giants, evil humanoids, and monsters. Despite the inherent danger, the lack of support makes it is a favorite destination for farmers who break the law and leave their plots. 

The farmers and Red Bank supporters are deeply intertwined. The people of Red Bank need to know about the results- so the priest at the Black Temple told Hungus when he reported in afterward. He would have the party carry a message to an elder in the village, a man named Pursadin. Given their less than stellar performance vis-a-vis the white haired elf, the party feels obligated to agree. Especially since they might need to call upon the Black Temple for aid again some day.

Just north of the city, harsh hills rise, the river cutting through them. The party walks up stream, following a rough trail. They pass goat herds they go, the animals well-suited to the uneven terrain.

“They sure could use a road to Red Bank,” Hungus remarks as they walk.

The journey is full of rises and falls, but overall leads uphill. Though the party members, excepting Bix, are fairly fit, they all find the walk taxing after a few hours. When they break for a mid-day meal, perched atop a hillside, Carl Hungus says, “This is harder going than I remembered. Good workout.”

“Ugh,” groans Bix. 

“You know,” the dragonborn continues, “while we're here, we should go after the Hacker.”

“Who?” Krillan asks. 

“He's a local bandit leader. Last I knew, he was hiding out in Bandit's Rook; that's on the way to Red Bank, more or less.”

“Is there a reward for catching him?”

“Probably. Maybe? There's the reward of taking his loot, anyway.”

Morsado grins. “Well, if it's on the way...”

***

Speaking of bandits...

Ambush!

The party hasn't yet reached the hilltop known as Bandit's Rook when they suddenly find themselves surrounded. The bandit leader demands their gold and silver. Instead, the highwaymen receive the party's steel. 

The fight is brief and brutal. When it is over, the adventurers continue toward Bandit's Rook, reaching it in another forty minutes. 

Bix and Krillan attempt a stealthy reconnaisance. They return after half an hour.

“There aren't bandits in there,” Bix tells the others. “There are gnolls.”

“I saw two hyenas on watch,” Krillan adds. 

“How many gnolls?” Hungus asks.

“I saw three,” Bix answers. 

“We can take 'em,” Krillan says. 

“Hell, I can probably drop one or two of them from here, if I can get a good line of sight on them.” Rorin thumbs his bowstring and grins.

“Right,” says Bix, “let's go!”

As the others advance toward the hilltop, Rorin scrambles up a tree, setting himself in the crook of a thick limb. He pulls out an arrow and takes careful aim. 

_Thwizz!_

The arrow plants itself in the first hyena's neck. It collapses. 

The other rises, bristling, and begins to yip. The gnolls, alerted, stand up and draw weapons.

The hyena yelps, staggers, and falls as the Butcher of Fandelose shoots it in the throat.  

Suddenly the other adventurers emerge from the night, screaming battle cries as they rush up the path. The gnolls turn to meet them, but it seems they have no chance.

Then something comes screaming out of the sky, a dark blot across the stars. Sharp horns tear through flesh. Bix screams in pain. Something large and heavy smashes into Hungus' shoulder, sending him spinning. 

One of the gnolls screams, diving away from the airborn predator. 

_What the hell is that?_ Rorin thinks, and fires a succession of arrows at the creature. It zips through the air, twisting and turning evasively, but he still manages to catch it once or twice. 

But his arrows seem to have difficulty harming it. There is something supernatural about the beast. 

Hungus deals a mighty blow to one of the gnolls, dropping it, as the winged creature wheels through the night sky, almost impossible to follow. Rorin hits it again even as Morsado and Bix combine their magic to finish off another gnoll with _vicious mockery_.

The final gnoll tries to run, but the winged monster descends on it, wicked talons tearing into its back. The gnoll cries out and falls, and the creature lands atop it, flipping it back over so it is face up.

The gnoll gives a final terrified shriek as the creature rips out its heart. 

And then flies away with it. 

There is calm on the hilltop.

Then: “What the hell was that??” Bix yells.

***

The Hacker might not be at Bandit's Rook, but the gnolls did have a human prisoner. Besides him, the party takes one of the gnolls prisoner, staunching his wounds before he bleeds out. “We can question him,” Hungus says, making air quotes around 'question'. “Also, I could maybe use a slave.” 

“You can't enslave a gnoll,” Bix protests. “They aren't civilized. He's probably not even housebroken! We should just kill him.”

“Maybe he knows something,” Morsado points out. “We question him first, then- we see.”

“I can't support slavery,” Krillan adds. 

“You guys,” sighs Carl Hungus.

***

Yarrfurr, the gnoll, proves to be eager to help in return for his life. He promises to lead the party to a hidden treasure, as well as to the Hacker's new hideout. The gnoll claims the Hacker has taken to running with orcs. All this, if the adventurers merely spare him.  

The party agrees. After questioning the human prisoner, Krillan gets him mightily stoned and then they release him; though he was a bandit, he's no threat at the moment, and there are few enough humans left that even a bandit's life is precious.

The party returns to the road to continue their journey north; the Hacker's hideout, according to Yarrfurr, is just outside of Red Bank. Therefore, they can complete their mission even as they continue trying to find him. But when they reach the path, they are pleasantly surprised to find- 

“Dzedz! What are you doing here?” Rorin grins and clasps the dwarf's hand. 

“The bartender at the brewery told me where you guys were headed. I didn't want to miss out.”

“Excellent!”

“Hi, I'm Krillan.” 

Once introductions are exchanged, the party continues north.

***

Red Bank! 

It's a tiny community that survives largely by hunting and fishing. The ground is too uneaven for easy farming. There aren't enough people for any businesses to exist; the party is disappointed to find that there is no inn or tavern, but instead, they must stay on dirt floors or sleep rough outside. 

Pursadin is easily located; everyone seems to know the old man. He has a shock of white hair above a deeply wrinkled face. When the party tracks him down, he is first somewhat suspicious of them, only relaxing after reading the note that they bear. “Too many times, strangers try to extort us or take our goods,” he explains. “But we're so small here that money is meaningless. All our trade is barter. What good are coins up here?”

“You can always take them to the city,” Hungus says.

“And be pressed back onto the farms we left behind? No thank you.”

A burly, bristling dwarf enters Pursadin's hut and speaks incoherently. 

“What was that?” Bix asks.

“This is the Iron Patriot,” Pursadin says. “He is our greatest hero. Our protector.”

The dwarf makes mouth noises again. 

“It can be hard to understand him.”

Morsado nods. “So I see.”

The dwarf continues talking, clearly trying to make some point or other.

“Well,” Hungus interrupts, “we don't want to take any more of your precious time. We have another mission up here. Have you guys had any trouble with orcs?”

The Iron Patriot exclaims something. Hungus is fairly certain the word 'orcs' was in there somewhere.

“From time to time,” Pursadin answers more comprehensibly. 

“Well, I believe an old enemy of mine called the Hacker is in league with a group of them, and we're off to try to catch him.”

The Iron Patriot speaks again, jerking a thumb at his own chest. 

“I think,” Pursadin explains, “that he wants to go with you.”

“Why not?” says Bix. “The more, the merrier.”

_*Next Time:*_ The Hacker's hideout!



*The careful reader might notice a common trait between Mad Max and Krillan. That's because Krillan is Mad Max's player's new character. Pretty much any pc run by that player is bound to be a serious pot head and/or heavy drinker.


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## Baron Opal II (Mar 28, 2019)

At this point, what are the gods / temples present? Presumably, Galador is not an option.

Bad fumble on Max's part, there.


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## the Jester (Mar 28, 2019)

Unfortunately, that wasn't a fumble at all! Mad Max's player said he was going to charge whoever threw the rotten fruit, killed the farmer in one blow, and then immediately said, "I cut down whoever is next to him"... and boom, suddenly, Max is a criminal. He probably could have gotten away with the farmer, but killing the kid touched off the riot and blew things out of control.

The deities in Fandelose are an interesting mix that is a sampling of the old cosmopolitan mix of hundreds or thousands of gods integrated into the Sword Empire. The gods present in Fandelose definitely make an incomplete pantheon, with huge gaps. Here you go- the first list is gods worshiped by at least a hundred or so people, the others are lesser worshiped but still have a presence in the city. There are actually the remains of several different faiths here (the Sun, the Sword Cult, one or two gods from the pantheons of Gorel, Pesh, etc). 

There are definitely some oddities in there, like the Sea Queen, whose faiths might wither away in time (no sea access!), while there are other, huge missing portfolio areas (e.g. there's no god of love) that might eventually be claimed by the existing gods. 

*DEITY --- PRIMARY SYMBOLS --- PRIMARY PORTFOLIO * 
Garnet --- Silver rose	 --- Family, multiple births, siblings 
Hamel --- A house, gear or door  --- Civilization, walls, cities 
Han Zo --- A stalk of rice  --- Agriculture, farming, rice 
Holthro --- A bloody-knuckled fist --- Violence, rage, revenge 
Lester --- The four elements --- Adventure, heroes, heedlessness 
Morlo --- A crutch, old man or beggar  --- The downtrodden, beggars, the aged, slaves 
The Sword Cult --- A greatsword --- Personal achievement, skill, the Sword Empire 
Vandreu --- A black sword & shield --- Victory against overwhelming odds, righteousness, 													vindication; the Townsaver 

*DEITY --- PRIMARY SYMBOLS --- PRIMARY PORTFOLIO * 
Aresh --- Hands steepled together 		Hope, faith 
Boccob --- 	An eye and/or book			Knowledge, learning, magic 
Dramos --- Two clasped hands			Honesty, the law, teamwork 
Empeth  --- A coin or merchant's scale		Trade, merchants, money, greed, thieves
Eschatonism --- Sunset, an hourglass with all its sand in the bottomThe end of the world 					
Froth --- A phallus in the mouth of a skull  --- Necrophilia, rape, perversion, cowardice 
Galore --- A saddled horse or yoked cow --- Domesticated animals 
Malford  --- A displacer beast --- Trickery, revisionism 
Maltar --- A crimson eye --- Assassins, plotting, clever escapes
Na'Rat --- A black obelisk --- Chaos, change, upheaval, lost lore; the Chaos-Bringer 
Olesh Perr --- A paintbrush or carving knife --- Craftsmanship, art, creativity 
The Sea Queen --- The sea, a wave, water --- The sea in all its aspects 
The Sun  --- The sun --- The sun, day, summer, light 
Tade --- A hammer and anvil --- Creation, the forge, improvements in technology


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## the Jester (Mar 31, 2019)

Oh, on the topic of religions, I forgot to mention- Eschatonism sort of overlaps other faiths. One might be a worshiper of Malford who believes the end has come, for instance.


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## the Jester (Mar 31, 2019)

The Iron Patriot shoves his face up as close to Yarrfurr's as he can, though the gnoll is over two feet taller than him, and shakes a finger. He berates the gnoll in a loud, incomprehensible voice.

“Is he giving him a warning?” Morsado whispers to Hungus, who shrugs, as mystified as everyone else. Yarrfurr looks at Dzedz for guidance. 

“Uh, that's right,” he says. “You better listen to the Iron Patriot!”

***

Yarrfurr leads them to the north out of Red Bank. He explains that the Hacker's hideout is about a day and a half away from the little village. 

“Don't try anything funny,” Carl Hungus warns him, “or you'll regret it.”

“Yeah,” Dzedz adds, “remember what the Iron Patriot said!”

Yarrfurr seems cowed, but he's a gnoll; by nature, he is bound to be treacherous, cunning, and cruel. The party keeps their eyes peeled for any sign that he is leading them into a trap. But by the time they bed down for the night, the party has ascended through several ridges of hills, and the land is becoming rougher and higher. Brightly-colored lichens cling to rocks, and small wiry plants clutch the thin soil like desperate fingers. Birdsong is constant, though as they ascend, the types of birds gradually change. Small lizards and scorpions scuttle from the group's path. Several times during the day, they spy goats bounding away, and twice griffons soar through the air within a few thousand feet of them. At one point, they pass a large ruined water storage tank, and another time a toppled monument is visible on a neighboring hill, but otherwise, the day is uneventful.

Hungus shackles Yarrfurr to a low branch on a sturdy oak at the edge of their campsite for the night. “I wouldn't run away,” the gnoll protests. 

“You definitely won't,” Hungus agrees.

The party sets watches, declining Yarrfurr's offer to help. The night passes uneventfully, though the night is full of the sounds of nocturnal animals. Bats wheel through the sky, black silhouettes against the stars. The hooting of an owl sounds intermittently through the night; the distant scream of some kind of big cat is followed by the sounds of a brief struggle. But nothing disturbs the group.

Yarrfurr is, indeed, still there in the morning, leaning uncomfortably against the tree, arm suspended by the shackle. Morsado prods him awake and wordlessly gives him a strip of dried meat and a hunk of bread from his rations. 

The Iron Patriot shakes his head and speaks again, uttering a long string of grumbling words that nobody can quite make out. 

***

Early in the afternoon, Yarrfurr tells the party that they are approaching the hideout. “It's on the next hilltop over the ridge. But the Hacker probably has sentries watching for trouble. Last I knew, he was working with orcs, but I haven't seen him lately. Not for the last couple of weeks.” He looks hopeful. “Can I go, now?”

Dzedz shakes his head. “Not just yet. You're gonna help us take him.”

“That wasn't part of the deal!”

“Yeah, well, it is now.”

Iron Patriot yells at length in the gnolls face.

“That's right!” says Morsado. 

***

The Hacker does indeed have sentries out on patrol. A group of six orcs stumbles upon the party as they advance, and there is a swift, furious skirmish. The engagement quickly turns in the favor of the party, and two of the orcs try to flee. Dzedz slays one with a _flame bolt,_ but the other darts into the brush. The others delay the party just long enough for him to make good his escape.  

Yarrfurr curses. “They'll know we're coming now for sure.”

“And they'll know that you're guiding us,” Morsado points out in his raspy voice. “Now you've got nothing to lose by helping us take them out. In fact, if you do, it may help you preserve your reputation!”

Yarrfurr stares at him for a moment, nonplussed, then sighs. “This way.”

***

Iron Patriot is a gibbering lunatic in battle, becoming even harder to understand. He seems to be triggered by strange things, perhaps certain words or creatures. 

“I'm starting to suspect he doesn't understand himself, either,” Rorin mutters to himself after the second group of orcs is dispatched. He squats down and begins cutting the dead orc's belly open.

Iron Patriot stares at him and says something. He sounds disgusted. 

“That's why they call him the Butcher of Fandelose,” Carl Hungus says.

They have attained the hilltop, fought their way through another half dozen orcs. But once again, the Hacker isn't there. 

“I swear, this was his place a few weeks ago,” Yarrfurr exclaims.

“I believe you,” Hungus replies. “These guys are definitely the Hacker's type, and he's a half-orc himself. I know he has worked with orcs before. So my guess is that he's just not here right now.” He turns to the others. “I say we wait and see if he comes back.”

“It's getting a little late to head back anyway,” Dzedz responds. “And there's already a camp made up here.” True enough; though the hideout is primitive, merely tents and a series of large lean-tos for a combination of shelter from the elements and camouflage, there is a large stock of firewood near a large firepit edged with large stones. There are already large stones and chunks of wood, suitable for use as seats, around the firepit.

So the party settles in, staying alert but preparing to spend a night at the Hacker's hideout. And, as Hungus guessed, the Hacker returns home that evening, his own coterie of orcs with him.

The party hits them hard, and several of the orcs fall before they even know what is hitting them. The last thing they had expected was to be attacked from within their own camp. But the Hacker recovers his wits quickly and leads a charge against the party. 

“I _hate_ orcs,” Dzedz Orcslayer shouts, hammering the Hacker and two of his lackeys with a _shattering pulse._ One of the orcs is blown from his feet by the power of the magic. Iron Patriot, Carl Hungus, and Yarrfurr counter the orcish charge with a charge of their own, and the two groups smash into one another. Arrows whizz past, striking several orcs, and Rorin chortles as one collapses. Morsado hurls insults and taunts, demoralizing the Hacker. 

It doesn't take the party long to take out the orcs, but the Hacker is a tougher customer. He weathers a series of blows from Hungus and the Patriot, returning the favor with surprising strength and accuracy. He does his best, but alone, he is no match for the party. 

Then Hungus crushes the Hacker's chest with a blow from his maul, and the fight is abruptly over. 

***

Yarrfurr claims that the Hacker's treasure is the treasure he said he would lead the party to. While it's not a huge amount of loot, there are 6 platinum pieces in the mix, and the total worth is just over 90 gold pieces. Since the gnoll was so helpful in the fight, the party decides not to quibble. They let him go, not without misgivings. Once his shackles are removed, he runs away, vanishing into the hills.

The Iron Patriot seems disinterested in the loot, so the party splits what they have amongst the rest of the group. Then they return to Red Bank. 

***

When they reach the small village, it is abuzz with distress. Very quickly, the party hears what happened. 

Someone's heart was, quite literally, stolen. Ripped from her chest. 

“That sounds strangely familiar,” Rorin says. “Remember that flying deer thing that we saw? That ripped out the heart of that gnoll and flew off with it?”

The Iron Patriot speaks wildly, gesturing for emphasis.

“Let's go see that old guy, the village elder,” suggests Morsado.

“Pursadin,” Rorin says.

When they see the old man, his eyes are bloodshot from grief. “What's worse,” he tells them, “this isn't the first time this has happened. This is the seventh person we've lost this way in the last six months.”

The party draws out the details. The killings have all happened outside the village proper, on the hills surrounding it. “Foolish young lovers,” Pursadin laments. 

The Iron Patriot makes a rousing speech to Pursadin that nobody can understand. It takes him several minutes, and when he finishes, the elder nods gravely and says, “Thank you for your service.”

“Did you understand him?” asks Morsado. 

Pursadin shrugs. “I may not understand his words, but I understand his heart. He is our greatest protector, and he wishes to protect us.”

The Patriot speaks again, decisively.

“Listen,” says Hungus, “I have a plan.”

***

It's a classic. They bait the trap with a volunteer- a matronly woman named Matilda, who sits with Rorin on Lover's Hill, feigning a romantic embrace. Meanwhile, the rest of them lurk in the bushes and trees nearby, waiting for anything to take the bait.

Matilda and Rorin are far enough from everyone else that the others don't hear her as she attempts to seduce the young ranger. 

But nothing else comes of that night.

***

Iron Patriot waggles his finger warningly at Rorin as everyone settles in to sleep the day away. It was a long, fruitless night, and it gets cold waiting motionless in the bushes. 

“We'll try again tonight,” Dzedz says. “We just have to be persistent.” 

Morsado turns to Matilda. “Are you sure you're willing to keep doing this? You are risking your life.”

“It's for my people,” she answers. “If I can help stop this monster from killing more of them, I have to. Besides, you are the ones who are really at risk. You're the ones actually trying to slay it.”

“It's what we do,” Hungus declares.

***

That night, they do indeed try again. And this time, they have better luck. 

An hour past midnight, the thing arrives, swooping in almost silently to attack Matilda. But Rorin is prepared. His bow is hidden in the grass. When the deer-headed winged monster swoops into view, he snatches it up and looses an arrow in a blur of motion.

The creature shrieks.

The rest of the party reveals themselves in a flurry of ranged attacks, including a _flame bolt_ that illuminates Dzedz's location.

The monster slaps the air with its wings and seems to leap upward, banking and flying away. “Get it!” cries Rorin, loosing another few arrows, but it escapes into the darkness. 

“Damn!” Hungus steps out of the woods and pulls his maul. “Is it coming back?”

The party waits, but- no, it isn't coming back. At least, not yet.

***

They discuss trying again the next night. 

Dzedz opines, “It's too smart. It knows we're after it now. It's not going to come back.”

Morsado shrugs. “Maybe not. But think about this: it's only taking the hearts. Why? It must need them for something.” He spreads his hands. “And where else is it going to get hearts? Fandelose?”

“Besides, what's our alternative?” Carl Hungus drums his fingers on Matilda's table. “Give up and go back to Fandelose? Then it comes back and we aren't here to help?”

“We can at least try for a few nights,” Dzedz says.

***

That evening, as they are preparing to set out, a dirty figure with leaves in his hair and beard walks into town. He has the characteristic horns of a tiefling, and when Morsado sees him, he does a double take. “Uncle Stranger?”

The dirty tiefling stops and peers at him. “Morsado? Little Morsado? Is that you?”

“Stranger Danger!” cries Morsado, and the two embrace. “Uncle Stranger! I haven't seen you in years!”

“Yeah, I've been, uh, exploring my mind in the wilderness.” The tiefling's eyes come unfocused for a moment before resuming eye contact with his nephew. 

“Guys, this is my Uncle Stranger Danger the Ranger.”

There is a flurry of introductions. It turns out that Uncle Stranger has been another of Red Bank's defenders, though more of a scout and watcher than a warrior. 

“But I'm ready to take up arms to save our hearts,” he adds. 

“Well,” Morsado grates, “in a couple of hours, we're going to head out to a trap we're setting, if you want to come in case we lure the monster in again.”

“A couple of hours, you say? There's still time! All right, I'll be back.” With that, he turns and lopes off into the woods, only to return about half an hour later with a bag full of psychedelic mushrooms, which he tries to press on everyone.

“We're maybe fighting a nasty monster tonight,” says Dzedz. “Maybe another time.”

By way of reply, Uncle Stranger eats a few more mushrooms.

***

Though his reasoning was sound, Dzedz's prediction is incorrect. Where he went wrong was in assuming the monster's response. 

It knows they are hunting it, now- but instead of biding its time, when it returns, it brings friends. 

Three of the frightful bird-deer creatures swoop in this time, and when the party springs their 'trap,' it's really halfway toward falling into the monsters' trap. Nonmagical weapons barely hurt them, and nobody has a magic weapon. With three of the monsters to deal with, the adventurers have their hands full. 

They can't properly guard Matilda. 

She cowers behind a large boulder, but one of the winged monsters disengages from the party and leap-flies over the rock. A moment later, the party hears her dying wail, and sees the monster ascend into the sky, a dripping heart held in its teeth.

“Oh no!” cries Dzedz. “Not Matilda!” He tries to slay the monster with a volley of _magic missiles_, but it keeps going. 

The other two press the party hard, but they manage to take the monsters down after a significant amount of work. Since Morsado and Hungus can both heal, even when Uncle Stranger drops, the fight doesn't grow too dire. 

But Matilda...

After it's over, the party stands over the matron's corpse. “She gave her life for her community,” Morsado sighs.

“We need to track those things to their lair,” Uncle Stranger says, “and kill them.”

_*Next Time:*_ The party attempts to do just that!


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## the Jester (Apr 2, 2019)

Rorin frowns. “Tracking flying creatures isn't easy.”

“Are you good at tracking?” asks Morsado.

“No,” Rorin admits.

“What kind of ranger isn't good at tracking? Uncle Stranger, what about you?”

“I'm an _urban_ ranger,” Rorin protests.

“Yes!” Uncle Stranger stuffs a handful of mushrooms in his mouth and starts tracking. “I am amazing at tracking.” Yet his eyes seem strangely unfocused. “I'm the very best tracker! This way!”

“Hold on,” Hungus says. “Maybe we should wait until you have a little light.”

“Of course!” Stranger Danger chortles. “You are very wise!” With that, he plops down on his back in the grass to stare at the stars. 

***

One might think that tracking a group of flying creatures would be impossible, and that isn't far from correct. But it isn't completely true. Even flying creatures leave signs- droppings, for instance. Feathers. 

“Blood drops,” Uncle Stranger continues. “From the heart. And its own wounds. Look here!”

Though nobody but Morsado is quite sure they trust Uncle Stranger's tracking- and even Morsado has strong misgivings- the rest of the party follows the mushroom-addled tiefling. There's nothing that anyone else can detect that he is following; perhaps the mushroom visions he sees guide him. Either way, he leads them consistently up hill, going ever further into the hills, heading toward the mountains in the north.  

That night, Dzedz and Hungus join Uncle Stranger in his fungus-induced reverie. Morsado just shakes his head. _What if those deer-birds come back?_

But the night passes uneventfully, except for the wheeling of the stars and the pulsing of the ground beneath the hallucinators. 

***

Whether or not Uncle Stranger is really following anything, late the next afternoon, the party spies one of the deer-birds flying overhead. It spots them, too, and banks sharply, winging back in the direction from which it came.

“You see?” Uncle Stranger exclaims. “I told you we were heading the right way!” He gobbles up some more mushrooms.

The party hurries in the direction that the creature fled, eventually reaching a flattened hilltop with several large nests in it. In and around the nests are four more of the deer-birds. 

Rorin looses an arrow and cries out, “Get 'em!”

The ensuing battle is quick and deadly. The party focuses its attacks, and almost immediately bring down one of the monsters. Meanwhile Dzedz blasts several others at once with his magic. When the deer-birds begin to fight back, Hungus and Uncle Stranger form a line and prevent them from reaching Dzedz and Morsado. 

But it's hard to block flying creatures with an open sky to maneuver in. One of them launches itself over their heads and charges at Rorin. Its razor-sharp antlers stab into the ranger's chest, and he is forced to drop his bow and pull out his rapier. A back-and-forth follows, with Rorin jabbing at the monster and then seeking to parry its horns. 

Meanwhile, a second deer-bird falls after being smacked around by Hungus, scorched by Dzedz, and caught in Morsado's _cloud of daggers._ The three of them turn to the fourth monster.

At the same time, the one that is dancing with Rorin catches him with a terrific jab of its antlers. His belly rips open, and the monster rips its way through most of his chest. With a shriek, the young man falls, bleeding, to the ground.

Uncle Stranger manages to stab the other deer-bird hard enough to leave it bleeding from the neck. It shakes its head, and a blow from Hungus' maul connects. Even though it resists the nonmagical damage, it collapses in a heap.

Together, the party finishes off the last of the monsters, and then Hungus checks on Rorin, fearing the worst. But he is still alive, albeit barely! Carl Hungus lays hands upon him, and the worst of his wounds close up.

Rorin groans and opens his eyes. “Did we win?” He clambers to his feet, looking around at the bodies lying about. “We won.”

“We won,” Dzedz confirms.

“Then I'd better get to work.” The Butcher of Fandelose draws a dagger.

***

Carl Hungus' powers are growing. He can hear the Lady of Dragons whispering to him when he sleeps; he can sense her eyes watching him with increasing interest as he becomes more powerful. She grants him ever greater abilities, ever mightier spells. He can ask for more as he proves himself more worthy.

He has grown worthy enough to ask for something truly marvelous.

The next morning, Carl Hungus sits in prayer, uttering invocations while he makes the sacred signs.

“What's he doing?” Uncle Stranger whispers. 

“I'm not sure,” Morsado replies.

Ten minutes later, they are answered when a burst of smoke and brimstone appears. When it dissipates, a fiendish giant goat stands, awaiting its master. 

“Scrote!” cries Hungus. “You are Scrote M'Goat!”

“Bah,” Scrote says disdainfully, sounding nothing like a goat.

***

Just off the far side of the hill from the nest, the party spies a marble monument. A 6' high statue of a gnome stands atop a plinth, arms akimbo, before the entrance. Obviously larger than life, the gnome stands proudly, wearing an antiquated captain's military dress uniform with a shortsword at his side. The statue was once painted in lifelike hues, but only flecks now remain. The plinth bears a plaque of soft greenstone, but the writing on it has eroded and is hard to read. 

The party examines the writing carefully and manages to make it out. It says: “Here lies the tomb of Captain Perx. Faithful, steadfast, loyal, with steady hand and clever mind, a good friend to the people of his city and a good soldier to his emperor. 1977 to 2293 S.C. May his eternal rest be peaceful.” 

Rorin recognizes the name. Perx was a soldier of note, well-known for his kindness, loyalty and intelligence.

The door itself has twelve iron spikes hammered into the ground at its base to keep it shut. Someone has scratched “Beware the dead” in the surface of the door itself. 

“Interesting,” Dzedz mutters.

“I don't really like the dead,” Carl Hungus says. Then he turns at a strange, excited noise from Scrote.

Uncle Stranger is acting in a very improper activities with Scrote. “Hey!” Hungus shouts.

“No, he likes it,” Stranger Danger the Ranger claims.

Scrote looks at Hungus and winks. “Bah,” he says, but in a sexy tone. 

Everyone stares at Uncle Stranger and Scrote M'Goat. 

Then looks away.

Consenting adults and all that. Fiendish giant goat or not.

***

The party heads back to Red Bank, intending to return when properly rested and re-equipped (Rorin is nearly out of arrows). But once they are there, Uncle Stranger vanishes into the woods. 

“I'm not really all that interested in looting the grave of a military hero,” Dzedz says. 

That leaves Hungus and Rorin; but they are joined by Iron Patriot and a local halfling named Big John, to whom Iron Patriot seems to have some sort of strange attachment. He treats him with obvious affection, sometimes mussing his hair when rambling incomprehensibly at him.

***

The group removes the spikes from the door and pushes their way inside, though Scrote has to stay behind. Just beyond the door is a hall that opens onto a room, dusty but intact. It has an arched ceiling 10' high and two rows of pillars of pink marble. The walls are painted with images of Perx and his men fighting goblin and kobolds; laughing and celebrating; gambling, drinking and gaming; studying and learning; and helping construct what pcs from Fandelose recognize as Bronze Park. The back wall, where the Bronze Park images are, also contains a strange contraption.

Before the party can advance, half a dozen skeletons come clacking out of the shadows from where they lurked behind the pillars. There is a brief battle; though they are outnumbered, the party contains several stalwart warriors, and Big John proves adept with his fists. The skeletons' resistance to slashing and piercing damage doesn't much help against this particular group!

Afterward, the party examines the contraption, which proves to be a series of brass wheels within wheels, forming five concentric circles. Each wheel can be spun separately, each turning separately, while above the contraption is a small brass arrow pointing at the wheels and a large blue button. Each wheel is marked with the letters of the Common alphabet, although slightly antiquated versions of several of them. 

Experimentation reveals that touching one of the wheels causes a clear chime to sound through the area, and a clear voice speaks a riddle. Each ring provides a different riddle. 

The first is: _I feed on death. Choose wisely, and I shall feed you. Choose poorly and sicken and die._

“That's a mushroom,” says Rorin immediately.

Dzedz nods. “Sure, but what do we do with it?”

The second riddle is: _I have a face, but no eyes. I speak to you, yet have no mouth. I have leaves, but no roots nor bark._

The third: _Of no use to one; yet absolute bliss to two. The small boy gets it for nothing. The young man has to lie for it. The old man has to buy it._

The fourth: _You get many of me, but never enough. After the last one, your life soon will snuff. You may have one of me but one day a year; when the last one is gone, your life disappears. _

The fifth: _A barrel of rainwater weighs twenty pounds. What must you add to make it weigh fifteen?_

“Hmm,” says Rorin.

They fiddle with the wheels at length. “It has to be a five letter word,” Dzedz declares. “It can't be mushroom.”

While the others mess around with the wheels, Rorin pokes around the rest of the room. “Hey,” he calls after a few moments, “I found something. There's some kind of mechanism here.” He stands at one of the pillars. 

Hungus hurries over to try to trick it open, since he is proficient with thieves' tools. After a few minutes, he scowls. “I don't think this will open unless we solve the riddles.”

“Maybe there's another way.” Rorin pulls out his sword and sets to work, prying at the mechanism. It takes over an hour, and he ends up bending his blade, but he finally pries it open, revealing a 5' diameter shaft with a ladder that descends about 20' to the middle of another chamber. 

This room is 30' square, with a 10' high ceiling. The air is filled with a foul charnel odor. Old moldy tapestries hang on the walls, two per wall, flanking the three exit doors and a polished steel statue of the Sword Emperor, which dominates the west wall. 

As the adventurers descend, four stinking, animate corpses rush out at them from hiding places behind the tapestries. The tomb robbers are caught off guard; the ghouls paralyze Rorin before they can respond. 

Iron Patriot roars and lays about him with his maul. He gibbers words that nobody can understand. Hungus finishes off one, then another, wounded ghoul. In moments, the adventurers stand triumphant, and Rorin is beginning to twitch again.

“That wasn't so bad,” Big John says. 

The tapestries are too moldy for anyone to discern what was once depicted on them. The statue of the Sword Emperor shows him in an aggressive posture, weapon raised, face fierce. 

The first of the two flanking doors leads to a chamber that contains only a dry basin. The second has another contraption with concentric metal rings, similar to the one above, but without the lettering, only a colored marking. Carl Hungus suggests that it's a way to re-open the shaft from below, without having to consider the riddles. 

Neither of those two chambers has any other exits. The third door out of the room with the statue leads to a 15' wide, 15' long entry passage with an 8' high ceiling, leading to a 30' x 30' main chamber with a 12' high ceiling. When the Iron Patriot enters the chamber- he is at the point of the party's formation- four man-sized elegant bronze lanterns, hanging from thick chains, flare to life with a warm yellow glow, and the temperature changes from the typical cool of an underground area to a pleasant, summery warmth. The room's main feature is obvious: a clear sarcophagus containing the skeletal remains of a gnome dressed in rotten finery, with a number of bejeweled items on his person, a short sword at his side and a book on his chest.

The party moves very carefully, expecting traps, expecting the corpse to animate- expecting some danger. But there isn't any. They have made their way to the true tomb of Perx, and when they manage to prise open the sarcophagus, they find themselves with a considerable amount of loot, including spell scrolls of _grease, blur_ and _hypnotic pattern_. 

More important, they take Perx's sword, a rapier, which Rorin claims. It is clearly a special weapon, but they have no way to identify it at the moment.*

_*Next Time:*_ The Iron Patriot goes to Fandelose!


*_The Sword of Perx_ is a unique magical weapon that requires attunement. It grants a +2 bonus to initiative if it's in hand when initiative is rolled and granting its wielding proficiency in Intelligence saving throws. However, when in combat with kobolds or goblins (not other goblinoids), it also gains a +1 bonus to attacks and damage and a +1d6 bonus to critical severity. Rorin learns all that some time later.


----------



## the Jester (Apr 8, 2019)

The Iron Patriot is profoundly uncomfortable in the city.

The crowds remind him of masses of soldiers fighting for their lives, dying. There are far too many people, and there is far too much smoke. The clamor reminds of him dimly-remembered events in the trauma that have made him who he is. 

Why has he come here? 

He glances at the companions with whom he is walking. Fundamentally, the reason he has just entered Fandelose is this: they cannot comprehend him, and on the trip back through the hills, he couldn't orient himself toward Red Bank. Now he wants to go home as quickly as possible. 

Yet the Iron Patriot feels unable to leave the group for a single reason: Big John, whom the Iron Patriot has mistaken for a child. For as much as the Iron Patriot is the defender of Red Bank, he is also the defender of children. And if ever he has seen a child in need of a good example and some firm guidance, it is Big John.

Thus, as the party heads through the Lower District, when a young tough approaches the group to try to sell them drugs, the Iron Patriot steps up with a waggling finger and a ranted message that nobody quite catches.

But the thug catches Iron Patriot's tone, and summons a rag-tag collection of gangsters to his side. 

Iron Patriot warns them. He gives a long, incomprehensible speech.

“Look,” says Hungus, “we don't want any trouble. Our friend is just a little bit excitable.” Dzedz and Roran exchange a glance. “Why don't you just move aside, and we'll be on our way.”

One of the young toughs says, “I think they should pay a penalty.”

There is a general chorus of agreement. 

“No, I don't think so,” Dzedz retorts.

And the Iron Patriot has had enough. He rushes forward. The thugs pull out clubs and surround him. “Damn it!” swears Hungus, drawing out his maul and striding toward the group. 

The clash is relatively brief. Once they realize that they're facing real trouble, the gang scatters. Hungus casts a couple of _cure wounds_ spells, and the party moves on. 

***

Sipping his bean juice, Dzedz asks, “What now?”

The Iron Patriot ejaculates mangled words nobody can make out.

“I think we should go back to the megadungeon,” Carl Hungus says. “We can go back to that big shaft we found and go down on ropes.”

“You mean the one with the gnolls?”

“Yeah. The gnoll hole.” Hungus grins, inordinately pleased with himself. 

***

The Iron Patriot would just as soon go home. He isn't needed here. He tags along, haranguing his compatriots. When the group sets out for the dungeon, he waggles his finger at Big John. Crestfallen, the halfling stays behind. Dzedz, Roran, Iron Patriot, and Hungus form the expedition.

The group again takes the smooth round passage bored by a thoqqua into the gibberling level, and again are soon beset by large numbers of the little hairy monsters. 

Dzedz comments, “They must breed really fast. It seems like no matter how many we kill, there are just as many when we come back.”

“Maybe we just need to try harder,” Roran says wryly.

***

Shortly before they reach the gnoll-hole (as they are now officially calling it), the party runs into another adventurer- a dwarf named Krank Cleigier. He hails them as he stomps toward them. 

“Hello,” says Dzedz after the group and Krank introduce themselves. “I take it you're down here looking for loot?”

“Yes, but I haven't been having much luck. These little hairy guys don't carry anything, at least not as far as I've seen. And they're easy to kill one-on-one, but they run in large groups...”

“That's why we should run in large groups.” Dzedz grins. “Why don't you join us? Even shares.”

“Even shares,” Krank replies, nodding.

***

The gnoll-hole is 50' deep, and once again it is guarded by gnolls at the bottom. The party pushes through, then out into another chamber with more gnolls. 

Then into another chamber with more gnolls.

It rapidly becomes apparent that this level is controlled by gnolls (assuming that the gnolls themselves aren't the lackeys of something more powerful). The party pushes several rooms deep, finding some treasure, but then more groups of gnoll warriors start to arrive, responding to the sounds of fighting.

The party is forced to retreat. 

By the time they reach the shaft, they are in a full route. Hungus and Krank are badly wounded, and neither Dzedz nor Roran are without a scratch or two. Roran is forced to make a bold stand, stabbing with the _Sword of Perx_ and holding the doorway while his wounded friends pull themselves up the rope that they left dangling down the gnoll-hole before finally breaking and running himself. He gets away, suffering a few more stabs and cuts to the legs as he scrambles up. 

“They're climbing after him!” Dzedz calls. 

“Not to worry!” Hungus pulls out a dagger, and as soon as Roran makes it to the top of the shaft, he saws through the rope. The gnoll falls, landing with a crunch. “Ha!” the dragonborn chortles.

“Don't gloat,” Roran warns. “Let's get out of here!”

As if to confirm the ranger's concerns, an arrow whizzes past Hungus' face. “Right,” he says.

The party returns to the city.

The Iron Patriot has had enough. He leaves alone, following the trail to Red Bank. He can only hope that kid Big John comes back to him; he could really use a father figure. 

***

The beer is flowing in the Fandelose Brewery. The party had some success in their last expedition, and nobody spends money like adventurers flush with success. And nothing breeds a thirst for more adventure like a successful expedition that brings back riches. 

Inspired by the rounds purchased by Carl Hungus, Dzedz, and Krank, a none-too-bright fellow named Charly asks to join them on their next adventure. “Sure, why not?” Hungus cries drunkenly.

Morsado and Uncle Stranger walk in, spot Hungus and Dzedz, and come over to join the group. Soon they're all deep in their cups. Even so, Hungus deflects when Uncle Stranger asks after Scrote.

“There are goblins raiding travelers between here and Red Bank,” says Uncle Stranger. “You guys interested in helping me to drive 'em off?”

“Sure, Uncle!” Morsado grins at him and takes another deep drink, wiping foam from his beard.

“Why not?” Dzedz shrugs. “It's a good cause.”

“And they probably have some treasure,” Hungus says, “especially if they've been getting it from travelers!”

***

The goblins aren't hard to find; the party simply travels between Fandelose and Red Bank, back and forth, for several nights. 

The goblins, accompanied by worgs, come at them from out of the darkness. They come more than once over the next few nights, but each time the party slays some and drives the others off. 

On the third day, they meet a pair of travelers who have also had trouble with the goblins. One of them, a fellow named David, is a young scion of one of the local noble houses, House daVoi. He is out sowing his metaphorical oats. In short, he is an adventurer. 

“What about you, friend?” Hungus asks the other man.

“I am Johann, and I am here to preach the word of the God-Bomb!” the other man proclaims. “Have you been touched by its power? The God-Bomb touches us all, friend!”

“Uh, that's nice,” Hungus says, nonplussed. 

David daVoi shrugs. “I don't know, cousin.”

***

There are more dangers in the area than goblins. Griffons circle overhead, but don't approach. Instead, trouble comes from below. Huge burrowing insects erupt from the ground, spitting acid.

“The God-Bomb take you!” shrieks Johann, and radiant power blasts one of them. The other members of the group begin to reconsider their opinion of the fanatic. 

The party squashes the bugs. Later, when a hungry bear attacks them in camp, Johann again proves his usefulness.

But the goblins!

***

The goblins, it turns out, are led by something else: a barghest, a terrible fiend from the lower planes that can shift between the form of a goblin, that of a dark wolf, and a sort of hybrid form. The party learns this when they take a goblin prisoner after yet another attempted raid on them.

That's not all they learn, either. It turns out that not all the local goblins are aligned with this barghest. The ones who are now wear the sign of the Iron Butterfly, but many others are members of the White Tongue tribe, who do not support the strange new idolotrous religion that the barghest is pushing.

“You tell us where the barghest's lair is,” says Johann, “and we will cleanse it from this plane! It will feel the wrath of the GOD BOMB!!!” He is shouting by the end of his statement.

Hungus adds, “Better yet, we'll let you live!”

“Will you release me?”

“Sure!”

The goblin nods. “I'll point it out tonight. You will be able to see it once it's dark.”

Indeed, when night falls, the goblin gestures at a nearby peak. “There. You see?”

Peering carefully, Hungus shakes his head. “There's nothing there.”

But Johann has sharp eyes. “There's a light up there. It's hidden, but I can see it. It's a sign! GOD-BOMB!”

_*Next Time:*_ Our heroes enter the barghest's lair!


----------



## the Jester (Apr 8, 2019)

The Final City is a pressure cooker. Since long before the disastrous protest at which Mad Max unleashed his fury upon a young lad, the pressure has been building, but that particular moment won't be forgotten. Yes, the Army of Argos managed to shove the lid back on and hold it closed, but Mad Max's actions have certainly turned up the heat. 

In the Upper District, groups of farmers meet, some openly, some in secret. People rant and cry over their losses, but the murder of a child is unforgiveable. Demands for Max's head are sent to the Citadel, vanishing into the military decision-making apparatus with no reply.

Elsewhere, in the hills outside of the city to the west, a large number of members of the Oaken Circle meet. The Oaken Circle is what remains of the druidic order that has long existed in parallel to civilized society, hiding in plain sight. The Oaken Circle's sympathies lie far closer to the farmers than to the army and the authorities in Fandelose, and they discuss what they can do to aid the farmers' plight. Their discussions will continue for months as they debate a proposal brought by one of their less forgiving heirophants- to attack where the city is weakest, its food supply.

“But the farmers are our allies,” another druid protests. “If there are food shortages, they'll be the ones to suffer deprivation first. And if the Argos discovers that they intentionally sabotaged the crops, they'll be made to suffer.”

But the one who proposed the idea shakes her head. “I've developed a spell for just this purpose,” she declares. “A spell that will both protect the farmers and harm the city.”

“You Shadow Circlers are all the same,” sneers a goliath. “You just want to see the city fall.”

“Is it wrong to wish to see even humanity return to its natural state? Is nature not what we all swear to uphold?”

“It could be argued,” says another druid, this one a centaur, “that the city is the natural state of humans.”

They will not resolve their debate for months. When the moot breaks up, one particular member _wild shapes_ into a swift and wings away, descending in the hills just outside a strangely landscaped area. Giant ants rush all about, working to create a monoculture garden to encourage the growth of giant aphids for their nectar production. Here is the lair of a druid who did not attend the moot- one who is no longer welcome among his fellows. One who has turned from his own kind, firmly and with purpose; one who was once of the Shadow Circle, but who found satisfaction in a different way. 

This is the lair of the Ant-Man.

***

The journey to and up the mountain with the flame upon it takes several more days. Along the way, the group has to fight off several natural predators- a bear, an owlbear, a flock of blood hawks. As they draw closer, they encounter a group of goblins led by a hobgoblin warlord. After a brief, fierce clash, the party puts them to the sword. 

“We're getting closer, cuz,” David daVoi says.

But as they come closer, they become more obvious to the goblins of the Iron Butterfly. From their vantage point above, the tribe can see them coming. And so the attacks become more frequent, with a group of worgs rushing out of the trees at them. 

Not long afterward, they stumble upon the remains of a campsite, but upon examination, it is too clean and well-tended to have been used by goblins. In addition, there is only one set of footprints in the camp, and they are larger than those a goblin would leave. 

Several hours later, the party catches several goblins secreted in the brush, spying on them, and ensures that they can't report back.

“It's a sign!” Johann shrieks. “A sign from the GOD-BOMB!! Here, so far from home, so close to danger, we are shown that this place is for us, for our kind!” He rants on for several minutes- long and loud enough, in fact, to draw the camp's former occupant out. 

It is Sarec, who has been idly mulling over the idea of changing the spelling of his name. 

“Hey there, Hungus! It's been a while!”

“What are you doing so far from the city by yourself?”

“I'm out adventuring. I'm not a fan of the city, really. I've been hunting goblins.”

“You should be careful, cousin,” David daVoi says. “It's dangerous out here.”

“I'm not worried. I'm an outlander. We're used to this stuff.”

“You realize that most of the outlanders around here have died off due to monsters, right?” Hungus shrugs. “I'm just saying.”

“I'm not worried,” Sarec (perhaps Sarek, in the future?) repeats. “I'm a bad ass with my haliburt.” It takes the others a moment to realize that he's referring to his halberd. “If they even come too close to me, I'll smack 'em!”

“One of these days,” Hungus sighs, “you're going to end up eaten by griffons.”

“No way!” Sarec grins. “I'll be the one eating griffon steaks!”

***

Sarec isn't the only friendly face our heroes meet on their way up the mountain. When they break for an extended lunch, the Iron Patriot catches up to them from behind. He, as usual, is trying to protect his home, Red Bank, from the perennial threats surrounding it. When he enters the party's camp, he exclaims in a happy tone, then speaks at length, not that anyone can understand him. 

Nonetheless, David daVoi answers him: “Welcome aboard, cuz!”

***

Thus reinforced, the party cuts their way up the mountain, hewing through wave after wave of goblin assault. Some come with worgs, but the number of goblin-wolves is rapidly depleted.

Soon our heroes face the sole surviving worg- an immense, old, grizzled bastard, ridden by the barghest itself, though the fiend's identity is not apparent until our heroes find their weapons barely able to hurt it. 

“The God-Bomb take you!” screams Johann, calling down the wrath of his deity in a burst of radiant power.

The barghest and its worg ally are much tougher than any of the goblins the party has fought before. They have the last five goblins of the Iron Butterfly tribe with them, along with the worg mother's five young (but still fully-grown) brood. Yet Krank, Hungus, daVoi, and Sarek form a line that keeps the mass of enemies back from Johann and Dzedz, who hurl spell after spell at the barghest. 

The goblins fall first, but then the barghest manages to run David daVoi through with his spear. The noble scion collapses, blood spraying everywhere.

“No you don't!” Hungus cries. He strikes and unleashes a smite, driving the barghest back. 

Then it changes, its body flowing into a new form- a hybrid goblin-worg, all snarling teeth and slashing claws. It leaps onto Hungus, and the two struggle. 

Johann leaps forward to daVoi's bleeding body. “It's not too late for you, brother!” the fanatic shouts, eyes blazing. “The power of the GOD-BOMB can still save you!!!” He presses his hands on daVoi's wounds, and they knit shut. David daVoi's eyes snap open, and he staggers to his feet.

A worg rushes at him, but Sarek cuts it down before it can reach him. 

Dzedz fires off a _shattering pulse,_ damaging most of the remaining enemies and throwing the big worg from its feet. “Now!” he shouts. “Get it!”

Though Hungus is still too busy dueling the barghest, the other warriors do as Dzedz asks. Krank finishes the large worg with an overhand blow of his axe. The remaining worgs, seeing their mother die, break and flee. 

The adventurers let them go, finally free to place all their attention on the barghest itself. 

Snapping, snarling, the monster backs up slowly as the warriors of civilization press it. Sarek's halbert hacks into its chest; Johann hits it with a _sacred flame_; daVoi rushes to flank it with Hungus. 

Dzedz calls out, “You're done, monster!” He blasts it with a volley of _magic missiles_, but it still won't fall. It rips open daVoi's wounds, sending him spinning back to the ground. 

With a growl, Hungus says, “Feel the power of my Queen!” He roars and swings, unleashing the last of his power in the mightiest smite he can. 

The monster wobbles, but remains standing.

The Iron Patriot gives a cry, screams incomprehensibly, and attacks, laying into the barghest with all his might. Making confusing noises, the dwarven defender of Red Bank puts his all into it. Flecks of foam fly from his mouth. And finally, a punishing blow from his maul connects with the fiend's head, and the barghest falls at last. In only moments, its corpse begins to give off foul vapors, and in less than ten minutes, all that is left of it is a stinking, greasy stain and some rancid, rapidly-softening bones and hair. 

***

Once more, the Iron Patriot finds himself in the wrong place.

After looting the treasure from the Iron Butterfly goblins' lair, the party returned to the city. Somehow, Iron Patriot missed the turn to Red Bank again- and here he is, back in the damned city. He complains to the others, but they just don't understand him. 

At least he can look for Big John while he's here.

***

All that money is addictive. These adventurers, far from heroes when they began, have at least acted heroically. They have aided the most helpless people in the area, the folk of Red Bank; they have driven away a fiend from the Lower Planes; and they have come out wealthy for their efforts.

“The next step past wealthy,” Hungus points out to the others, “is downright rich! We've gotta keep doing this stuff.”

“We already killed the goblins,” Sarek says. “What next?”

Dzedz and Hungus exchange a glance.

“Let's go back to the gnoll-hole,” suggests the wizard.

“Yes!” cries Hungus. “Megadungeon!”

The party keeps drinking. The brewery, while not a tavern per se, has become one of their favorite haunts. It is also rapidly becoming infamous for the adventurers who come and buy rounds for everyone. Business is good.

“I want to buy a house!” Hungus declares.

But that's easier said than done. After all, if someone in the city sells their house- where would they live? There is only one answer: outside the walls. And living outside the walls is very, very dangerous. Only the boldest or more desperate do so, and most of them are picked off by one threat or another after a few years. The houses that cluster near the walls just outside the city are safest, but even they suffer the depradations of the local wildlife. Griffon attacks, while not common, are far from rare. Owlbears, giant insects, and other things periodically hunt the alleys in the dark of night, and the careless frequently go missing.

Far easier, the group will eventually find, is locating a house for rent.

_*Next Time:*_ Our heroes head down the gnoll-hole to the Laughing Level!


----------



## the Jester (Apr 17, 2019)

This is not a city of heroes. Not now; not yet. The Heroes of Fandelose have had their day, and those days are past. They are dead, or old and retired, or just retired. A new crop may rise, and it may happen soon, but for now, the city's champions are less heroes and more adventurers.

But villains- ah, villains. Fandelose is full of villains. 

Some are hidden in plain view, preaching to the city's poorest and most disenfranchised citizens, spreading the word of their foul god. Others keep their faces turned away from the public at all times, fearing the shining of the light of discovery on their unsavory activities. Some work invisibly within the organizations that the city must trust to protect it, undermining it from within. 

But there are others who are more blatant, whose faces adorn wanted posters. Others such as Pa'ash Svenko, tiefling warlock, known devil-worshiper, known bandit, wanted for murder, arson, robbery, destruction of property. Surely, if he were resident within the city, such a famous villain would be turned in to the authorities in no more than a few days. At the very least, someone would tip off the White Battlet as to where to find him. The price on his head would be too high to resist.

Instead, such a villain, one who depended on raiding the civilized folk for both his own sick satisfaction and to ensure he and his lackeys can live in comfort, might choose a relatively safer place to live. Somewhere, perhaps, that offered an opportunity to cow and lord over weaker creatures, a place to set oneself up on top of a social hierarchy.

That's right. Pa'ash Svenko lives in the megadungeon.

And- oh, yes. Cast back your mind. Do you remember Mileen? Mileen, the missing colleague of Lazarus, for whom Dzedz was supposed to look so long ago?

Whoops.

***

This time, the party includes Carl Hungus, David daVoi, Johann, Dzedz, Sarek, and the Iron Patriot. As they descend into the dungeon, the distressed dwarf complains incoherently, clearly telling them something very important to him.

They follow the thoqqua hole to the gibberling level, then fight their way through a pair of giant spiders en route to the gnoll hole. 

“Hey,” says Dzedz, “didn't we leave ropes here before?”

Indeed they did, but there is no sign of them now.

“It was probably the gnolls,” Sarek says. 

The party drops new ropes and descends into another battle with the gnolls. They fight their way through, press forward into another area with gnolls and their pet hyenas. 

The party doesn't recognize the danger they are facing until it is almost too late.

Among the enemy is a ghoul. It paralyzes David daVoi and Sarek, almost turning the tide against our protagonists before a raving Johann can call upon the power of the God-Bomb to turn the ghoul. 

They press further into the gnolls' area. Hideous laughter echoes down the halls, coming from hyenas, both normal and giant, and gnolls alike. There are enemies closing in from everywhere, from every direction. 

The party intercepts one group of gnolls, puts them to the sword. To their surprise, they find that the gnolls are transporting a pair of prisoners: a scared-looking halfling named Tommy and an elf named Keymaepa. 

“This is awkward,” says Sarek. “I mean, we don't want to leave you on your own here, but we're kind of in the middle of something here, and we haven't found much treasure yet.”

Dzedz asks, “Do you have any useful skills?”

The elf smiles. “I am a warlock.”

“And I'm a druid,” the halfling answers. “And I'm pretty sure that these gnolls you just slew have our gear.”

“I wouldn't mind the opportunity to get a little revenge while we're here,” Kaymaepa adds.

“That settles it!” Sarek smiles at them. “You can come with us!”

“Equal shares for all,” Dzedz says.

***

The party, swollen with their two newest members, advances further. The gnolls' areas tend to be ill-kept, messy, with garbage and waste often left lying in plain view. The party finds their meat larder, which hangs with both humanoid corpses and several sides of cattle. 

Solemnly, Kaymaepa touches one of the dead humans. “This was one of our adventuring companions.”

“I'm sorry,” says Sarek.

Further on, they cut through half a dozen guards in a foyer outside a well-appointed lair. Here they meet a much more dangerous gnoll than most they have met, dressed all in red plate armor, along with his four personal guards. Clearly, he is some kind of leader- but with such a large party, he and his guards have no chance. David daVoi finishes the gnoll captain off, slicing his throat.  

“Too bad that armor is so big,” Hungus remarks. “You guys could use some plate armor.” He nods to Sarek and Johann.

The party takes stock of itself. A few of them are a little banged up, and most of their healing has been expended by now, but Dzedz still has several powerful spells available, and Hungus has one or two tricks left up his sleeve. They decide to keep going.

The next door they open leads to a large chamber, within which is a hydra. 

Tommy slams the door shut, and David daVoi throws his weight against it. “I don't think we want to fight that!” the halfling exclaims. 

But they may not have the choice. The door explodes outward and one of the hydra's heads smashes it to pieces.

“Why not?” shouts Sarek, leaping forward into the room and slashing with his halberd. 

“The God-Bomb will protect us!” shrieks Johann, hitting the hydra with a _sacred flame_

David daVoi shrugs and leaps to stand with Sarek. Hungus hangs back for a few moments, but finally rushes to the front as well. Tommy uses his last spell slot to coat the hydra in _faerie fire_, while Keymaepa unleashes _eldritch blasts_ at it. 

The hydra is very dangerous, but as long as it is confronted by many targets, it seems that its heads are not very good at working together. Each snaps at whoever is closest to that head. And slowly, the party cuts it to pieces, finally finishing it with a _flame bolt_ from Dzedz. The fight leaves the front line warriors all wounded, but only daVoi is knocked unconcscious. Tommy quickly scrambles forward to stabilize him. 

***

Everyone agrees that it's time to withdraw. Carting daVoi's unconscious form, they retreat back through  the gnoll level toward the gnoll hole. 

Halfway there, they are ambushed by a pack of hyenas. They cut the beasts down.

“There!” Dzedz points just ahead. “The ropes! That's the gnoll hole!”

They hustle forward but are intercepted by a trio of gnolls that barrels into them from a side passage. Hungus smashes one down, Sarek cuts the second one in half, and Johann's holy power eliminates the third. 

Tommy and Keymaepa scramble up the ropes, followed by Hungus. At the same time, Sarek quickly ties a harness around daVoi at the end of the ropes. Hungus hoists their unconscious ally aloft, his arms bulging with the effort. When he's done, he unties daVoi and drops the rope back down for Sarek. He and Dzedz climb up.

“What do you think? Should we leave the ropes again?” asks Hungus.  

Dzedz shrugs. “We might as well. We got enough loot to replace them, that's for sure.”

“Someone somewhere is going to be collecting quite a pile of rope,” comments Sarek.

***

The party returns to the thoqqua hole and exits the dungeon via it. Once outside, the party parts ways.  Hungus, daVoi, and Johann sleep in the Black Gorge, intent on re-entering the megeadungeon the next morning, while the others return to Fandelose. 

“If you guys ever want to join up for an adventure with us,” Hungus tells Tommy and Keymaepa before they split up, “we hang out at the brewery a lot.”

The next morning, after using up their healing to ensure everyone is in good shape, Hungus, Johann, and a revived David daVoi head back in.

***

They make it to, and down, the gnoll hole without any trouble. There are no guards at the bottom. 

“We must have depleted their numbers pretty severely,” Hungus remarks. 

They explore. The level is large, densely packed, with many rooms and numerous passageways. They find a sleeping ogre and back away, leaving it alone. Before long, they find a stairway down.

“The God-Bomb will protect us!” Johann asserts. 

They descend, passing into a large chamber. And it is there that disaster strikes. 

Lurking in the shadows, a huge monstrous spider covered in bristles that drip acid senses the three of them. As they take in their surroundings, its scuttles forward with in silence, and before they are even aware of it, it sprays a cone of caustic acid all over them.

All three of them shriek in pain. But Johann is quite literally half-dissolved. The cleric's God Bomb does not protect them after all. 

Hungus curses and strikes back, unleashing a mighty smite, but the spider monster shrugs it off. DaVoi's jab also hits, but barely hurts it. 

The two flee, retreating up the stairs. The spider lets them go, content to slurp up Johann's remains. Hungus has only a meager amount of healing ability left; he uses it now, but both he and daVoi are still wounded.

David daVoi shakes his head. “This may have been a bad idea, cuz. I think we need to get out of here.”

He's right. But as they move through the gnoll zone, they are intercepted by half a dozen gnolls and a giant hyena. 

The two of them freeze. 

“Drop your weapons,” growls one of the gnolls in Common. 

They have no choice.

***

In chains, stripped to their loincloths, they are cast before a tiefling who sits upon a large chair. “I am Pa'ash Svenko,” he says, sneering at them. “You are now my prisoners.” He looks them over.

“This one had fancy armor,” one of the gnolls says, pointing at Hungus. Pa'ash glances at the platinum-chased armor that Hungus has invested some of his treasure in. 

Pa'ash smirks. “Good. We shall see. If your lives are worth enough, we shall keep you for ransom. If not...”

daVoi says, "I'm a noble."

***


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## the Jester (May 5, 2019)

Now before we switch our focus for a bit, it's time to talk about the elephant in the room- or, perhaps, the room in the elephant. If an elephant is a house. Which is to say, we're talking about the aforementioned rental house. 

Now, to be perfectly frank, neither my notes nor my memory recall exactly when it is that Hungus, David daVoi, Dzedz, Mad Max, and the rest (but primarily Hungus) managed to rent the house on Banker Street, but it seems likely that it was before this point in our ongoing tale, so let's talk about it.

The fact that there are no other places to live other than the city makes anyone who owns property within the walls extremely reluctant to part with it. After all, once you do, your options are limited to either renting a room or apartment, building a new place outside of Fandelose proper, or living on the streets. So someone giving up their home for a quick pay out is simply not a thing anymore. 

On the other hand, there are times when homeowners die. If there is no clear heir, the city seizes the property, which is subsequently either awarded as a reward for service or repurposed for the good of the city, such as by being converted into an apartment building. 

All of this means that the adventures' attempts to buy property in the city had proven fruitless. Stymied, Hungus instead hit upon the idea of renting an empty house in the Bronze District. And as it turned out, there was such a place available for a steep price at #14 Banker Street, located literally right across the street from the Fandelose Brewery. For obvious reasons, this seemed like an ideal location, and the place was fairly large, with several buildings, two storeys, a large basement, and a sturdy roof- all important considerations. Hungus secured an arrangement with the owner, although their relationship would sour over time as the house became less reputable, notorious for hosting constant parties full of violent adventurers, and as Hungus repeatedly violated the agreement's "no modifications to the house" clause. Also, the small herd of goats atop the roof, often loudly and publicly violated by Scrote, made any nod toward discretion impossible. 

Many times, Hungus or Mad Max or another of the people who invested in the house would come home and find it filled to bursting with disreputable adventurers drinking their booze and eating their food. Often, when a group went out on an expedition, they would leave a note for their friends, telling them where the group had gone. "We're in the gnoll hole." "Heading to Red Bank." "East of town, in the woods, looking for owlbears." Whatever. It made it easy for different adventurers to find each other, to join forces, or sometimes, to prey on each others' successes or failures. 

This was the start of Fandelose's Adventurers' Guild, started inadvertently and mostly by rumor, and which mostly consisted of bandits raiding or extorting travelers going to and from Red Bank- a problem that would plague the area for years.


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## the Jester (Mar 24, 2020)

What was that about switching focus?

Some two weeks earlier, Kevan the Sharp plays a witty song in the Wall Café. He has the crowd captivated. They hang on his every word, swaying with the rhythm of his rhymes. His tunes are sharp and quick, his lyrics dramatic and clever, his wit evident. Among the crowd, a woman draws almost as much attention as he does- his sister, Lavendoula. Part of the reason for the eyes on her is her sheer charisma, but there is more: there is a story about her. An angel descended, called her by name, gave her an instant legend then and there before she had even done anything. It happened in the city, in the middle of the day, in front of witnesses. There is something special about her.

The place is crowded. Groups of people are forced to share tables with strangers in order to accommodate the mass of folks in the place. The aroma of bean juice fills the air, mixed with the sweat of the dancers and the smell of pipe smoke. At Lavendoula’s table, an expressionless young human male dressed in a _gi_ in the style of the Pan Lung School is wrist wrestling with a cold-eyed tiefling woman wearing the _sha shi_ of the Manticore Monastery. Beside the woman, a bony human man in a midnight robe tries not to roll his eyes at their antics. He is her friend; the Pan Lung monk is her rival.

Sitting languidly, smiling prettily, a dark-haired human woman with a whip coiled at her side sips her coffee. Through long eyelashes, she watches for a pocket to pick. She’s pretty sure that it’s not going to be one of the people she is sitting with that produces a big payoff. Monks? Pah. Not likely. And the grim-looking fellow has the air of a spellcaster about him. Best to be safe. She glances to her left, where a bored-looking elf sporting a green mohawk sits before an empty cup. “What did you say your name was?” she asked.

“I didn’t,” he sniffs, “but it’s Praxis.”

“I’m Danielle,” the woman replies. She wants to add, _Queen of Thieves,_ but she knows just how pretentious that would be at this point.

“I am Edward,” the robed man intones. “My friend here is Verena.”

“Call me V,” the tiefling growls as the two monks, score evened up, disengage their wrists.

“And I am Hajime,” says the Pan Lung monk.

Lavendoula introduces herself as Kevan’s set ends, and adds, “This is my brother, Kevan,” as the bard joins the table. The two half-elves look strikingly alike.

“I see you’ve found some… company, sister,” Kevan says, looking the group over with a dubious eye.

“Hey, everyone has to sit somewhere, “ Danielle replies with a grin.

“Speaking of which…” a new voice says, and a small hand lands on Danielle’s arm. “Hi, Danielle!”

“Oh, hi, Shelby!”

The newcomer is a halfling woman, brown haired and slender, with large eyes and long fingers. She is one of Danielle’s friends, and better still, a fellow member of the Smoke Fades, the city’s thieves’ guild. “Mind if I join you? I’ll buy a round of bean juice.”

The group gladly accepts Shelby’s generous offer. (Bean juice costs a full guinea a cup; it’s a fairly extravagant expense.) Danielle eyes her curiously. “You must have had a bit of luck recently.”

“Sure did!” Shelby grins at her. “Do you know about Marble Hall?”

Edward says, “The megadungeon?”  

“The same. I just got back from a trip in. We had some pretty good luck. I mean, yeah, we had to fight some orcs, but we managed to pull through without any losses. And we got some decent loot.”

“How much?” Danielle asks.

“Plenty.”

Shelby sits with the group for only a few minutes, then heads off “to take care of some errands” (which Danielle mentally translates into _pay the guild its cut_). After she leaves, the group begins to talk about the megadungeon. While not all are motivated by the prospects of wealth, each of them does see one or more reasons to go in- be it treasure, knowledge, money to help the orphans, to slay monsters to protect the city, or simple hatred of orcs.

Thus forms another party of adventurers, agreeing to meet on the morrow to head in to Marble Hall.


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## the Jester (Mar 24, 2020)

This group so far consists of:

Hajime, human monk 1
Lavedoula, half-elf sorcerer (favored soul) 1 (a custom celestial sorcerer)
V, tiefling monk 1
Edward, human wizard 1
Danielle, human rogue 1
Praxis, elf ranger 1
Kevan, half-elf bard 1


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## the Jester (Mar 25, 2020)

In the morning, the party meets up at the Wall Café and sets out. They pass outside the great triple walls of Fandelose and down the roadway that stretches to the south. Just a few hundred yards away, the Black Gorge runs perpendicular to the road, a gash in the earth extending off to the right. This is the first time that any of these people have descended into it; as they do, they are covered by cool shadows.

“I heard that the entrance is held by dwarves,” Praxis remarks as the group descends. In the dimness, several figures stand near the entrance. “But those are orcs!”

“What’s going on here?” Haji calls out. After all, there is a tribe of orcs in the gorge who are loosely allied to the city. But even as he speaks, he spies the bodies of several dwarves, and the orcs hurl javelins at the party. There will be no parley here.

Battle is joined.

Vee and Haji both leap into the battle, trying to outdo each other and thus bring honor to their own school. Praxis follows on their heels, while Danielle hangs back in the rear of the group and fires a small crossbow. The two half-elves and Edward stay just in front of her; Kevan calls out mocking barbs, while Lavendoula unleashes a _chromatic orb_ and Edward casts _chill touch._

The orcs are more primitive and unsophisticated- they rush the front rank and try to cut them to pieces with their greataxes. And here the lack of experience of our heroes comes into play. None of them are yet savvy enough to turn a lethal blow into a glancing one, to dodge the worst of what might be a deadly attack. A single blow from one of the orcs nearly disembowels Praxis, and two more drop Vee.

But Edward is more than a necromancer. He is also a skilled doctor, having picked up significant surgical and first aid skills at the Institute for Study of the Mind. He scurries forward and quickly bandages his friend, then waves a vial of smelling salts under her nose. Vee’s eyes blink open and she surges to her feet.

Meanwhile, one orc (already wounded by Edward’s spell) falls to Praxis, and the elf swings the short sword in his off hand at another. It lunges in at him, but drops wailing with one of Danielle’s quarrels in its eye. The remaining ones roar and score another hit, this time on Haji, but quickly fall under the party’s now-superior numbers.

The group pauses to bind their wounds and check the bodies for loot. The orcs each have a few guineas, so that’s something.

“Do you think these are the orcs of the gorge? Those guys aren’t usually hostile,” says Kevan.

“They’re orcs,” Haji replies.

But Edward shakes his head. “No. Look at the sign they bear. I don’t know what clan the orcs of the gorge are led by, but it’s not this one.”

Indeed, now that he points it out, the others take a moment to stare at the weird symbol that the orcs wear. “Is that… a butterfly?” asks Praxis.

“Or a moth, maybe,” answers Edward. “Note that it’s gray.”

“It’s not the gorge orcs.” Danielle pokes one of the dwarven bodies with the toe of her boot. “They have a truce with the dwarves. It’s actually usually the dwarves who start trouble with the orcs instead of the other way around.”

“Whoever they are,” Praxis says, “there are more of them inside.” He is kneeling at the edge of the ruined marble flagstones surrounding the entrance. There are a few footprints obvious to the rest of the group, but he adds, “There are at least a dozen of them in there.”

“Those six were a pretty tough fight,” Vee says hesitantly.

“I’m not afraid,” Haji declares.

“I didn’t say I’m afraid!” She glares at him.

“Then it’s settled,” Danielle interjects. “You two lead the way.”

Without hesitation, Haji steps up to the entrance. Vee hurries to join him.

***

The stairs lead down, then turn 90 degrees as they enter the dungeon’s first room. The monks hurry down- and there are three more orcs below. Haji hurls himself off the edge of the stairs, leaping on the closest orc from above.

Vee growls as a crossbow bolt shoots past her and Praxis vaults over the other edge of the stair. She rushes to the bottom to engage the third orc. Once more, they are backed up from the rear by _vicious mockeries, chill touches,_ and _flame bolts_ from the spellcasters. Danielle’s bolts continue to find their targets, hitting necks, kneecaps, and other especially painful areas. The battle lasts only a few moments; with the advantage of numbers, the party quickly overcomes the orcs.

After going through the orcs’ pockets, Danielle scampers after the others.

***

The party’s inexperience shows itself again shortly, when, after a little exploration and another encounter with orcs, the party realizes that they have managed to get turned around and disoriented. They try to backtrack but find themselves in an area they haven’t seen before, and soon stumble into another group of orcs.

This time, however, when they are mid-battle, they are joined by a pair of warriors- a human and a dragonborn. The two charge in from behind them and help them quickly dispatch the orcs. Afterward, they introduce themselves. The human is Axius; the dragonborn calls himself Serge. They tell the party that, although off-duty at the moment, the two of them are soldiers from the army.

“What are you doing here?” asks Lavendoula.

“We’re off-duty,” Serge repeats.

Axius says, “We thought we might be able to find a little extra scrilla down here, you know?”

“And who’s going to miss a few orcs, anyway?” Serge adds.

“Certainly not these orcs.” Edward hoists one of their shields and gestures at the symbol. “Do you recognize this?”

Both newcomers shake their heads and Axius quips, “It looks orcish to me.”

“We should take one alive,” the wizard states.

“Hmph,” grumbles Praxis.

“How did you find us?” Vee asks Serge.

“We followed the piles of bodies.”

“Ah. I guess that would work.”

“And bloody footprints,” Axius adds.


_*Next Time:*_ Our new band of heroes learns the secret of the orcish symbol!


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## the Jester (Mar 25, 2020)

As the group explores, they find signs of battle: dead orcs and dwarves. 
Clearly, they had been in conflict.

“It must have been recent,” Edward states, “or the orcs- who I think have won- would have disposed of the bodies by now.”

And indeed, soon the party finds a room whose door seems blocked from the inside. After some work, they force it open- and find a dormitory with half a dozen grim-faced dwarves, most of them wounded. 

“What happened here?” Lavendoula asks them.

“The orcs came up from inside the dungeon,” a gray-haired dwarf with a bald pate says. “Took us by surprise. I’m not sure how many of our folk are still out there.”

“From what we’ve seen, not many,” Praxis says. Danielle elbows him sharply, but the dwarf remains stoic.

“Perhaps we can drive them out for you,” Haji offers.

“For payment, of course!” Danielle interjects.

“Of course,” the dwarf says. “Obviously, you’re adventurers. We normally ask an entrance fee and then a percentage of whatever you find when you leave the dungeon. If you can help us drive off these orcs, as long as we control the entrance, we’ll let you pass for free.” 

“Both ways,” another dwarf adds.

“That’s not necessary,” Haji says, but Danielle speaks over him.

“Very much. That’s not very much.”

“It can really add up over time. Especially the exit fee. We ask a percentage of what you find, so the bigger your treasure haul, the more you have to pay us.”

“And is there a lot of treasure in the dungeon?” Danielle asks.

“Oh yes,” says the dwarf, “tons.”

***

After their next battle, the party manages to take an orc prisoner. 

Fortunately, Lavendoula can speak Orcish, so the party can interrogate him. The orc proves surprisingly willing to tell all he knows in exchange for his life. 

“Who is your leader?” demands Lavendoula.

“Pa’ash Svenko,” the orc replies. 

“He’s an orc?” 

“No. He is… like her.” He gestures at Vee. 

“A tiefling?” 

The orc shrugs. “He looks like her.”

“Why do you follow him?”

“He came, slew our chief and priests. He preached a new god for us to worship. The Iron Butterfly.” The orc frowns. “He said that our old gods were weak.”

Lavendoula relates this information to the party, and they puzzle over this ‘Iron Butterfly.’ None of them have heard of it. “A butterfly seems like a weird thing for orcs to follow,” Praxis remarks.

“And iron?” Kevan snorts in disdain. “That doesn’t even make sense. Sounds like a bard who makes a thirty minute long song that doesn’t really have any changes in it, except maybe for a solo or two.”

Praxis shrugs. “I don’t know, that could be nice. You human-bloods are always in such a hurry.”

Lavendoula turns back to the orc and asks, “How many of your folk are there?”

“Scores.”

“What else is in here?”

“Many monsters. We have some terrible-heads with us.”

“Terrible-heads?”

“Great beasts,” the orc explains, “with terrible heads.”

“Terrible how?” Praxis asks after Lavendoula translates.

But the orc seems to have a hard time explaining. Ugly? Perhaps with a nasty bite? Scary? Yes, all that. Terrible, he elaborates, “like a skull but with flesh.”

***

The party makes the orc lead them back to the exit, then let him flee outside. 

“Maybe we should make a map this time,” Haji says. 

“You make a map,” Danielle retorts. 

He executes a short bow. “I have no paper,” he says gravely. 

Edward begins rummaging in his satchel. “Just a moment. I have some in here.”

Haji bows again. “Very well.” 

The party begins to move again, this time tracking their progress so that they can return from whence they came. After a few minutes, they find their way back to the dwarven dormitory, where they check in with their newfound allies. Then, progressing further, they find a few abandoned chambers, including a forge and a store room full of goods, some of which have been pried open and rummaged through. Not far beyond that, they begin to smell the stink of garbage, and then they enter a large chamber that centers on a large pile of trash. The group can hear rats squeaking in the mess; a mess of orcs mills around drinking and talking loudly, pretending to stand guard.

The party attacks.

_[/b]Next Time:_[/b] Our heroes (and these guys are definitely more heroic than those other guys we were following) venture deeper into the dungeon! More poking around!


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## Shandy (Jul 14, 2020)

Hey it's Big Aaron (_Carl Hungus_) I just wanted to say great writing, it is cool to see what alpha did before before I joined.  I really enjoyed the story form of the games!


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