Slain by Elf

After a prank played many years ago, it has been traditional for an absent player to return to the next session to find that his character has been treated badly by fate, changed in some horrid and occasionally irreversible way. Partly because of the initial prank, and partly because one of my own characters became afflicted with the disease yet continued to succeed in the saving throws until the end of the adventure and so lived in ignorant bliss, it has been customary for the character to have mummy rot.

Of course, despite the initial scares and worries about beloved characters dying to a dreadful curse, it didn't take long for players to realise that their character probably didn't have mummy rot for the tenth time, particularly when it happened when they were absent and the party was in the middle of an adventure so far devoid of undead. Never the less, the tradition remains.

This week, Bert is not to be seen and we take a little too much glee in defacing his photocopied character sheet. As much as we want to try to convince him his elf has mummy rot, Will has a better idea. And so Bert is returned his character sheet and, with as straight a face as I can muster, I tell him that 'your pet received some kind of buff, I'm not sure what, I was out of the room when it happened'.

Intrigued, he checks his pet's character sheet and is curiously happy to see that his cat now has DR 5/slashing. He also spots the immunity to mind-affecting effects and, sadly, the crossed-out constitution score. Rather than accepting all this as some benefit, he works out pretty quickly that we let Skelra raise the cat to be an undead companion. Such a shame, it would have been amusing had the penny dropped only during the next session.

He is, however, assuming that we modified the character sheet for giggles, and that his cat really wasn't killed and subsequently raised.

Ghouls! They have a paralysing attack, which could spell trouble if we are all afflicted. But the odds of each of us getting paralysed is surely negligible.

Well, Skelra's minimal armour class pretty much ensures he doesn't last long, particularly as the ghouls get a surprise round against us. But that's only one down and probably all the ghouls will have to celebrate, for what little unlife they have left. Ganelon springs in to action and slices one of the ghouls in half...

'That's a neat trick, I'm using my mace.'

'Okay, you smash him in half.'

...cleaving in to a second to kill two monsters in one swing. Yep, this fight is going to be simple. Even losing Brennan to a paralysing attack in the second round doesn't faze us, as Ganelon and myself are still up and swinging.

Ganelon is still up and swinging. A particularly well-aimed claw digs in to my side and I stiffen up. But it's okay, I drop a ghoul before I am taken out of the fight. It's just Ganelon and the ghoul leader. I know who my gold is on.

Maybe I should have bet on the ghoul, but then how would I collect my winnings? Our paladin's full plate armour isn't entirely impenetrable, the last ghoul standing slashing in through a chink in the paladin's defences. But even though his armour class isn't obscenely high, only stupidly, Ganelon's fortitude saving throw certainly is. He can only be paralysed on a roll of a 1 or a 2. For once, with the rest of the party counting on him, we appreciate this.

The D20 rolls across the table, bumping in to the GM's screen and landing on a 1. Crap, that means the whole party is paralysed with a ghoul ready to suck our attributes dry. But wait, the D20 hasn't landed flat on the table! It is slightly cocked against the GM's screen.

A little tug on the screen confirms that the D20 didn't come to a natural rest, giving the paladin a reroll. Thankfully, the second roll is an easy success and Ganelon finishes the combat by killing the final ghoul. But it was close.

We let the devil out of his cell. And by 'we', I mean 'me and Skelra', whilst the others are taking a see-no-evil approach to our adventuring, heading around the corner so they have plausible deniability over our actions.

No sooner is the cell door open than the devil springs out and teleports away. I'm sure we won't see him again at a critical point in the adventure, it'll be fine. He left his glaive behind too, an intelligent and evil weapon which, after of placating the paladin somewhat, we stuff in to the handy haversack (unbranded) until we decide what to do with it.

Pressing further in to the Asmodean Knot, we encounter a pool of stagnant, murky water. We split up to walk around it when creatures jump out and attack! 'Ghouls!', shouts Brennan, knowledgeable about many monsters.

Brennan makes a knowledge roll and the GM formalises the monsters' identity, 'they are Lacedons'.

'Ah-haaaaaaaa!', gloats Ganelon, at the bard's apparent failure to identify them properly at first. 'You were wr-'

'Lacedons being aquatic ghouls, of course', says the GM.

'-ight.'

A creature that looks uncannily devilish appears to be trapped in a cell in the maze of corridors that is the Asmodean Knot. As it is the only living creature in a row of cells, and the only one we've encountered so far that can't attack us on first sight, we strike up a conversation. Skelra and I talk to it in infernal, pertty much confirming it is a devil, but we don't know exactly what it is, so we ask.

'I'm human. What are you?'

'Um, can you hand me the monster manual?'

'I, uh, I suppose so'.

'Right, I remember now. I'm a Barbazu.'

'Okay. And what's a Barbazu?'

'Cuts hair.'

'Thanks, Brennan.'

Loitering to stare at the pebble perpetually falling down the supposed bottomless pit is not such a great idea. Shadows appear from the opposite walls! Not shadows cast by the flaming pebble, or whatever torch or magical light is illuminating the room, but shadows the incorporeal monsters.

The shadows approach and attack, ignoring armour as their insubstantial arms slash across our bodies. I'm not quite agile enough to avoid one of the attacks, causing me to feel my strength start to fade away as the shadow drains me.

'Mage armour still counts against touch attacks', both Brennan and Ganelon say, happily reminding me that Skelra's magic continues to keep me safe.

'In that case, the shadow's attack missed!'

'That's lucky', says the GM, 'as it just saved you six points of strength damage'.

'Good, because I kind of need that.' Fighting defensively helps again, giving me the +3 to armour class that contributed in preventing the attack from hitting.

'+2', Brennan reminds me. But, no, +3, because I have enough ranks in the acrobatic skill to provide a bonus to fighting defensively.

'Ah, I thought it sounded like an odd number.'

'That's because it 3 is an odd number', says Ganelon, happy to help where he can.

This isn't good. Our paladin had trouble walking down a straight corridor and being presented with what was essentially a crooked crossroads. Now we've passed on from that passageway to open a door in to an Escheresque room, containing a stairway that heads forever upwards, regardless of whether we turn left or right to start with, and returns to where we are standing, as well as a seemingly bottomless pit. If Euclidean space confuses him, this is going to make Ganelon doolally if we wait here too long. So let's ponder the apparent paradox for a while.

'Wait, a 'bottomless' pit? Yeah, I've seen these before. All I need is a worthless object that I can gently drop down the pit...'

'The elf!'

'...first dabbing it in lamp oil and setting fire to it, so that it can be seen clearly in the darkness...'

'The elf?'

'I was thinking a pebble, but if he wants to volunteer I'm sure he'll be fine. It's not really bottomless, just an illusion with some kind of portal. I bet he'll just keep on falling, appearing back above us as he reaches however far down the portal is.'

'Until he burns to death.'

'...I suppose so. Okay, not the elf, which was never my intention, but a pebble.' I grab a pebble from the ground, dab some oil on it and light the oil, then casually toss it in to the pit. Sure enough, it falls for a bit, more slowly than normal though, before disappearing and a flaming pebble dropping down from above us. 'As I thought. It's your standard, bargain bottomless pit.'

What surprises me the most is that the pebble is the only object perpetually falling through the space. I find it hard to believe that no one else has ever been tempted to throw something, or an elf, down the pit to see what happens.

There are greater treasures in this room than quills from the howlers. Bookshelves line the walls high above, half-full with old-looking tomes. There may not be anything particularly extraordinary, but they are old and hefty enough to be worth a decent amount of gold.

We take a few down and flick through them to see if there's anything of interest, apart from their monetary value. 'They mostly seem to be about torture', says Brennan.

'Torture?!' says our paladin, in what we can only be mock outrage considering his own moral values. 'Torture is not to be tolerated.'

'It is also not to be misunderstood', reasons Brennan. 'Books themselves are not inherently evil.'

'Evil books are.'

'...evil books are, yes. Normal books aren't.' I'm glad we cleared that up. We'd normally struggle to carry all these books out to where we could sell them, particularly for only a few tens of gold coins, but Brennan knows where he can stick them. 'I'll put them in my extra-dimensional space.'

'I'd rather you didn't. Store them in the handy haversack (unbranded) instead, please.'

Howlers! They howl, hurting anyone with ears, and they have sharp quills that damage anyone engaged in melee combat. That's pretty much all of us. We have little option but to engage them in melee combat, though, and have to slog it out one-on-one.

Afutavere has some advantage in being able to bow the first howler, attacking from range and not getting hurt by the quills, but it lets Ganelon swoop in and steal the kill with one lucky hit. Our paladin, apparently now more comfortable with the simple arrangement of corridors, then moves around and behind the second howler. Brennan's been fighting toe-to-toe with this beast, hitting it for plenty of damage already, but once again Ganelon delivers the killing blow with his first hit.

I'm fighting the third howler, cautiously attacking to keep my defences strong. As Ganelon kills the second it frees Brennan's action to come and help me, which gets the paladin a little concerned. 'Hey, are you trying to steal my glory stealing?' Either way, the third beast drops and the howling stops. Well, almost stops, Afutavere's foot-long ears can't help but resonate a few minutes longer, subjecting our elf to more wisdom damage.

The damage is clearly affecting the elf's senses. 'I'll take a couple of quills as mementos of the fight', he says, the rest of us struck stupid by his suggestion to actually try to stop him.

'Make a reflex save', says the GM.

'But they're dead', Afutavere says.

'And the quills are still surrounded by other quills.'

His wisdom may be reduced, but the elf's dexterity remains high, and he is able to snick a couple of quills out from the howler's hide without stabbing himself with any others. Not much is said about how he wants to keep hold of them, though. I hope he doesn't simply shove them in a to a pocket.

'I suppose we'd better follow where his tongue leads us.'

'You don't hear that very often.' Quite, but I'm hoping to make it our catchphrase, even if it means sticking my tongue on every secret door or portal to hell we come across. It shouldn't be too difficult, as I seem to have some practice with licking items I shouldn't.

The other members of the party, except rearguard Skelra, cross dimensions through the mirror-like object and join me in a corridor. The corpse of an elf lies a few feet away, slumped on the floor. 'Is the mayor an elf?', Brennan asks.

'No, human.'

'Then it's not his son.'

'I dunno, his son is meant to be deformed. Ha ha ha!' I'm such a wit, but we are soon reminded that the mayor's 'son' is probably little more than a cover for earlier untoward events, and probably doesn't himself exist. We examine the body and make sure he's really dead before rifling through his possessions.

The corpse has a lot of interesting spell components on him, mostly necromantic-based, as well as a handful of scrolls of necromantic spells, all found in a handy haversack (unbranded). What a time for our mage to be left in the room behind us—Wales—and our faux-good paladin to uncover this necromantic stash. It's all we can do to stop him from burning the scrolls. We need to distract him with something.

Walking down to the end of the corridor has a huge set of doors open to reveal three branches leading off in different directions. One goes to the right, one off at an angle, and the other directly ahead continues the corridor. A little peaking down the branches shows them all probably meeting up to form large triangles. It's all a bit overwhelming for the weaker minded of us, Ganelon wondering aloud 'does anyone know where we are?'

'Yes', says Brennan, 'we walked through a door and down a straight corridor'. When he puts it like that, or even a casual glance at the map drawn in front of us, it all seems so easy. At least the paladin has forgotten about the necromantic scrolls. Well, he has done so partly because of this distinctly Euclidean space and partly because of the large pig-like creatures with vicious quills that are bearing down on us and howling so loudly our ears are ringing.

We find the Asmodean Knot, gateway to our recovering the Chelish Crux. Our cunning strategy of opening every door in the mansion whilst the other guests are asleep or too drunk to notice pays off. At least, once we realise that perhaps a secret door is involved, and maybe the best place to look for that door is in the room behind the padlocked door that was barred by a first locked door in a building where all the other doors open freely. Nothing stays hidden from us for long.

The Asmodean Knot is a portal of sorts, rumour has it, otherwise acting as a kind of mirror. The blackened surface in front of us shimmers and ripples, but it clearly is reflecting our images. But all we know is what it probably is we're staring at, we have no idea how it works or what will happen when we interact with it. 'I think I'll put my tongue on it', I say.

Not having as broad an education as me, the others bizarrely don't get the reference to issue 10 of The Tick and it seems that I am actually going to put my tongue on the Asmodean Knot, at which point I disappear. Now they have a short time to decide whether I have been disintegrated by a devious trap, which is unlikely considering I am not wearing an artefact-level item this time, and not come near the mirrored object, or if I have been transported to another place and follow me, presumably by taking my lead and licking the Asmodean Knot.

I really hope it's the second one.