archaya
We left Bayonetta’s body at our campsite. We weren’t ready to return and there would be no point carrying it with us. A simple cairn of stones would do for now. u-Heury collected her possessions (and wages).. we will see what he does with them.
Further south and west we found a cavern floored with obsidian. It was slippery. Very odd, obsidian is normally shiny but not slippery.
Bern is currently a 4th level ranger. He wields the Azure Serpent Blade, which has two brother blades he seeks, paired with a bent and twisted shield of orcish design. It is reputed to preserve a corpse from decay if laid over the body.
Rumor has it that near on a score of years past, a woman mated with a werewolf in the woods west of Eastdale, and the man known as Bern o’ the Wild is the result of their mad, frenzied coupling. His friends, if he had any, would say it was the source of his freakish strength. His enemies say it’s why no one likes him. Bern says it’s mutual and stays in the woods most of the time. He sometimes offers to guide travelers in the area in exchange for an equal share in whatever treasure they recover. That way he doesn’t have to go into town to sell anything he might find himself.
We broke camp after a night of bitter cold at the edge of a field of strange black sand. It seems the rumors of an ancient magical disaster there are true. That, or it’s just black sand. u-Heury threw a fit when it was time to go in, and refused. He was packing his bags to head back to Eastdale. I wasn’t having it; it would be desertion in the face of the enemy and I said so to his face. He didn’t care. (Neither would I, if it’s the smart thing to do, but this is just sand and we supposedly make a living doing this).
After the pink slime disaster, we decided it was time to head back to town. We had found some items of value and quite frankly we were all a bit shook up by seeing one of our compatriots have his face eaten. Not to mention the ordeal of puzzle-solving overnight from the fisher king. But our first stop was to fatten our purses, so we headed to Retep’s antiquities… But only after checking them ourselves, of course.
I gave Ahnjela a resounding slap across the face with my gauntlet, and it seemed to sober her up. But it didn’t make the skeletons any more inclined to let us pass. We did establish that they only guarded two of the three doors in the room, leaving the middle door free if we wanted to go that way. We also established that pink would help us kill green if we wanted to go through the green door, but pink skellie is a mean bastard and I would hate to trust his word. We agreed to examine the other doors before provoking the skeletons.
When u-Heury was finished playing doctor with himself, we decided to clear out the two fishy folk playing handsy behind the door before going deeper into the cave system. We set up an ambush outside the door while u-Heury taunted them and tried to get them to come out. It didn’t go well. I continue to prefer a more aggressive approach to take advantage of surprise. We should be listening at doors and kicking them down, then swarming inside to take advantage of surprise. No intelligent creature will walk right into the formations u-Heury sets up. Even if they are effective should the fisher-village idiot stumble into one.
We managed to break Ahnjela out of the weird trance she was in by dragging her away from the crystals. She woke up and didn’t seem to recognize us, but after about ten minutes she was no more (or less) paranoid than usual. No doubt she’ll murder us all in our sleep later.
We decided to explore the other exits before braving that passageway, but we were joined by a few friends first. Silver hair girl volunteered to explore the underwater passage, so we fed her some moss to breathe the water and down she went. Problem: she can’t see in the dark and torches don’t work underwater. Our wizard did some finger waving and made funny lights appear. They couldn’t get far from him and he wasn’t willing to go swimming. Oh well.
A thin and wiry fighter with a hacking cough and a cynical outlook on life and death. His career started in the village of Helix, working as a town guard. He fled the city when it was attacked by an undead army that rose from the barrowmaze, and relocated to Threshold, signing up with the guard there under the alias “Feverborne” (Helix had been suffering from a plague outbreak at the time of his birth) and serving with honor if not distinction.
A cleric of Denara, goddess of trade and bureaucracy.
I met some new adventurers today. Seems one of St Ygg’s bunch had a vision or something and realized they were stuck in the wilderness, needing help, or maybe just an infusion of courage. I’m a fighting man and got no lack of that, so off I went.
Turns out they were all alive, just half dead from poison. Some sort of snake creature called an amphi… Something. Two heads, no ass, poisonous obviously. How does the thing shit? Anyways, they met two, killed one, drove off the other, but practically everyone there damn near died from the thing’s poison. Two of them just went straight home, calling it quits on the adventuring life. “For now”, they said. “We’ll be back”, they said. When hell freezes over, I didn’t say. Tact, I has it. Two of their henchmen didn’t make it at all. I hear the one fellow, Oscar, has a 0/3 record now. He brought back a dog alive once.