DND Blog: An account of the ludicrous trials and tribulations of the SD DND Crew
A few days of travel gets them on the road to the wine country. The spring air is bracing and the light showers help minimize road dust. It is towards the end of the third day as the group is rounding the bend in the road leading to the wineries when a body is spotted. …
Turns out, very little comes next. The group does some light looting and poking about and finds a charred tome, held by an equally charred corpse with a cranial implant. There is some discussion and the realization that several of the zombies they animated are also wearing Chaositek stuff, which raises many questions, but no answers. …
Once the lads and lassie have settled in, they start pursuing their agenda items. …
The parade of portcullises…portculli…pains in the ass makes the group a little crazy. KD transforms into an umber hulk and starts burrowing through the walls, gouging out chunks of stone as they tunnel westward. Eventually they breach a wall that leads to a series of interlocking rooms, filled with some sort of vision and noise-suppressing fog that greatly hinders the typical party approaches to these situations. …
The stairs have very small risers and the whole thing resembles a ramp more than traditional stairs. Perfect for stubby legs, or the wheels of ore carts and whatever is extracted from the depths below. “Shiny things!” …
Heading east leads to an intersection, some bars and a vast array of polished kobold skulls. The group takes this as a positive sign and treads that path, dealing with the obligatory traps they have grown to expect. They enter into a cavern, dominated by a fortress that surrounds a vast stair that rises into the ceiling. Hey look! An army of kobolds is approaching. …
A Knock is produced, and Fingers eases the door open. He glances left and right and once again, the gnome’s robe-enhanced vision allows him to survey without being surveyed in turn. The door opens onto an avenue of tall buildings in an even larger cavern. The area where the door opens is unlit, but to the right there are many small light sources and the noise of a bazaar. …
The party decamps and prepares to spend another day tooling around the mountain. When Fingers opens the door, a fire trap is triggered. Though the damage is minimal, it does show the kobolds are not entirely cowed. Exit by an alternate route is also trapped, so the gnome takes an airwalk into the hall. …
The fleeing scout vanishes into the city beyond, and the group is somewhat loath to pursue, given their recent arrival and being uncertain of the ins and outs of the place – which seems quite vast. Here the ceiling is hundreds of feet above the avenues and there is a vast square that the buildings surround. The square is the site of a vast battle, and the tattered remnants of kobold bodies litter the stone ground. …
The return to Ptolus is interesting. It seems they have caught the eye of more than one interested party, for their return is marked by contact from the Defense Council that would like them to go disrupt the growing undead threat to the northeast. It seems that the capital of the old republic is either under siege, or has already fallen to an undead horde that is growing unchecked in the wilderness. …
The group escapes the Lothianites and decides not to engage. As tempting as it is, it’ll probably raise more questions and bring more nosey do-gooders. They track the gnome to a barn, where the paralyzed guild leader and his main bodyguard are hiding out. The group enters, slays the bodyguard and makes off with the head honcho. They bring him to a small farm not terribly distant from the scene of the slaughter and get to asking questions. …
The ride out of Ptolus is fine and they barely notice the various eyes scrying them. Or maybe that is just imagination. Or paranoia. Still – just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they ain’t out to get ya. A gentle ride through the countryside and skirting the forest brings them to a town named after a ferry. The ferry no longer exists because some wizard got pissy and changed the flow of the river. Goodbye income stream. Goodbye jobs. Goodbye townsfolk. …
