Author Archives: shazia

excerpt 27

It’s been a long time since I wrote but logistics make for crappy storytelling so who cares that I ran out of ink, or that poisoned demon blood apparently turns pages completely black a day later. Here we are back in business and that’s all that matters.

To resolve our cliffhanger, Splug did *not* convince Arranis to put out his burning bits by peeing on them. But once those bits of his were no longer burning Oakley did convince him to try wrapping the flame-spurting bowl with a demonskin and trying again. The suggestion was successful in that Arranis did pry the topaz eyes out of the statue. However the fire burned right through the demonskin so Arranis had to caper about while on fire again.
.
We bent our efforts to toppling the Baphomet statue, Splug to painting a raven queen symbol on things, and we successfully established that the far door opened onto the room with the corrupted black pool. It was then suggested that we had strayed from our mission, and by more than just Oakley. Little of our recent accomplishments could be said to have furthered any of:

– the cleansing of Dragonroost
– the scouting of the fortress for Lord Padraig
– the locating of the missing eladrin princess with the unfortunate name
– the locating of Lord Markelhay’s ancestral sword.

We went back to the first room, to the huge double doors there and to the unresolved clanking noises that we had once heard behind them. Splug and Neil investigated the doors. Neil sniffed the keyhole and then licked the keyhole, accidentally licking Splug who was listening at the keyhole. An unperturbed although perhaps slightly hastened Splug opened the door stealthily just a crack. The view that met him was of the back of a kobold. The room beyond the kobold proved to be full of armored kobolds, kobolds in robes, gold and treasure, and more kobolds polishing gold and treasure. And a sleeping dragon, very large and very red. We all whispered for a while at the door.

Oakley: “How many kobolds?”
Splug: “More than ten”
Oakley: “Can you count to more than ten?”
Splug: “No. Only ten fingers.” <waggles fingers>

Neil used his ability to detect vulnerabilities on the dragon, thus did we learn again that it was asleep.

Besides that we could also see a second set of double doors, barricaded, and we could see a tunnel that was actively being expanded by kobolds with picks and shovels. Curiously the tunnel already looked plenty big enough for the dragon so why expand it – was a clever thought that did not occur to us until the next day. Instead we pondered various plans of how to solve the room, each of which led in its own creative way to our certain demise.

After a while Oakley wandered off and picked his way up a rubble-strewn staircase that was nearby. Klajdu and Splug followed. As did the rest of us once we noticed they were gone. Above it proved to be an old barracks, mostly ruined and with some bodies from a fairly recent battle. 3 dead beasties were of particular interest. Two of them were carrion crawlers and one was a “Bullet” – a sharkish looking thing that apparently burrows through the ground. We investigated a bit more to the west and found a campfire whose ashes were still warm. The bootprints and footprints looked like that of another party of adventurers. We were perplexed.

Oakley: “Are we the B Team?”

After finding nothing of value we camped for the night. I’m sure it was a safe place to camp. Within a hundred yards of a dead creature with teeth like a shark that comes up out of the ground with no warning. I mean clearly other people had camped here and either they had come to no harm or they had been eaten whole while they slept. Either way, a nearly painless night awaited.

The next morning we decided to head over to the main temple and get back on track a bit. Specifically,

Neil: “Lets get this Oakley guy satisfied cause he’s been a bit of a bitch lately.”

Oakley was on the whole gratified and began to regale us with tales of the temple at the center of the abbey complex, how it had a huge statue of a platinum Bahamut in dragon form, and statues of Pelor, Kord, Moradin, Erathis, Ioun, blah blah blah.

We reach the thus-vaunted temple and listen at the door. Splug is the only one who hears anything but what he claims to have heard is a faint rustle of wings like from an enormous pigeon and a deranged baby cooing.

Neil: “Hello! Angel Demon Baby!”
Splug: “Not Angel Dragon Baby?”

<Splug makes a brief but compelling case for dragons over demons. >

Shazia: “On the other hand, every time there *could* be a demon, there *has* been a demon.”
Splug: “That makes sense”

Neil then says “Guys I’m getting some really good vibes from this place” as he opens the door and strides in. We follow. The temple is indeed pretty impressive. There are many statues of gods all surrounding a towering statue of Bahamut. However the central statue of Bahamut has him in human form not dragon form.

Splug: “Oakley doesn’t know shit.”
Oakley: “Ah. The years and the drink take their toll.”

A woman’s croaking voice from far overheard calls: “All faithful of Bahamut come to worship”
We see them after a moment- 2 flying harpies wearing tattered priests vestments. One has holy symbols entangled in her hair. The other is in white robes that are spattered with blood and that end a bit prematurely in a jagged bloody cut.

Neil: “Greetings! Beauties! we would like to dedicate a great treasure beneath us, guarded by a couple kobolds!”
Harpy: “What need do the faithful have of treasure?”

For no reason that I can think of, I then said in Abyssal “Oh take those silly clothes off and get down here” which made neither myself nor the party very popular with our flying friends and in fact they tried to kill us. One started singing a bizarre nutzo version of a hymn to Bahamut.

Oakley: “I care not for this remix.”

The other started up with a delightfully strident impression of a deranged screaming baby.
Neil frowned in concentration for a moment and then again in frustration as he revealed to us that the two harpies had no vulnerabilities that he could detect.
As we joined the two harpies in battle three Angels of Valor suddenly revealed themselves and they, er, attacked us too. Which was disturbing to say the least, not least to our friend Oakley the damn paladin. The angels did seem a bit “off”, but they’re still clearly angels.

The battle was frenetic, complicated and most of all loud.

At one point Splug mockingly said “What’s it, gonna sing at me again?”, right before a harpy gave a deadly screech that nearly killed him.

—————————–

I don’t really want to chronicle the killing of the angels so I wont. It was, as Splug said at the time, a bummer. It even overshadowed the killing of the harpies which was quite glorious, with one of them being cut in half by Klajdu’s flaming hammer as it exploded.

Anyway, we clean up a bit, we have some brandy, we peer into the mysterious pool of water, we search the room. Splug finds a card in the Bahamut statue – it seems to be from the same deck as Neil’s Fool card except that this new card depicts a Sun. During the battle in fact an image of the sun had appeared on the ground but since a further accounting would lead back to the angel-killing, lets leave it there.

Neil reminds us of that vision he’d had and told us that it had occurred in this very hall. In case memory fails or previous entries of this journal are consigned to oblivion, this is the vision where the paladin kneeled in front of a Bahamut statue, drew a card from a deck, looked at it and then recoiled in horror as chaos broke out in the room around him. On the retelling thereof, Oakley offers that the paladin in the vision might well have been the famous paladin Havarr.

We settle in while Oakley purifies the temple. Except that he doesn’t. After much hemming and hawing, Oakley in fact says that he cannot purify the temple because he lacks certain artifacts he had rather optimistically expected to be here. A Brazier of Silver Fire, a Chalice of the Dragon ,and a Bowl of Eos’ Blood. As Splug starts to give him a piece of his mind Neil says “I no longer want to live with your pointless bickering” and jumps into the pool of water. He emerges a bit later still alive and claiming to have picked up a powerful sense of clarity. Splug of course then jumps into the same pool but picks up only some mild frostbite in his toes and some extra ranting and raving.

Splug: “This is good shit! This is the crystal blue persuasion
they’ve been talking about!”

Unsure of whether I’m taking a tonic or a weapon, I fill an empty flask with the mysterious water. Further into the temple we find stairs that lead down. After Neil darts back briefly saying he’d forgotten to get a harpy eyeball, we descend in relative quiet and as we do we can hear faint chanting up ahead. It is a hymn to Bahamut.

Neil: “I have a good feeling about this”
Shazia: “Is food involved in this good feeling?”
Neil: “its just a generally good feeling but if I had to think of a food it would be apples.”

I go on to explain that Neil’s visions of food have historically tended to precede parts where demonic things try to kill us.

Downstairs we come upon a group of 7 armored humans surrounding an altar. Worshipping at it even. There are four coffins one of which is open. They have little nameplates of which I can see two. Torin and Selfgar. The open coffin contains the remains of a knight. The people are chanting as we come in. Later it comes out that Neil and Splug (but not Oakley) realized that this priest or paladin had made a weird error with the Bahamut scripture. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

One of our new friends is a bit more ornately dressed and armored than the others and he identifies himself as Havarr.

Havarr: “Come travellers! Kneel and worship with us”

Oakland strides forward.
Oakley: “Are you true worshippers of Bahamut?”

These knights seem uneasy and have weapons close to hand.

Arranis: “how long have you been here?”

Oakley: “Were you not aware of the harpies upstairs?”

But it’s then that things take their normal left turn into
not-completely-reasonable.

Splug brazenly steals the skull from the open coffin, somehow without being detected.
Neil turns and says “This one is the guy that was in the vision that I had that was *not* a flashback”.
And Ezmerelda begins to flirt with Havarr.

excerpt 26

It is time to start drinking heavily. Temples are supposed to be clear about which god they belong to. That’s at least what I thought five minutes ago. That sir Oakley’s people 150 odd years ago had the temples in this place all cleaned up and dedicated to Bahamut. And that before that some minotaurs had them dedicated to others – Bahamut, maybe a bit of Moradin, a dash of Erathis – whatever. But not so much. it seems that throughout all this history, lurking beneath the surface of this place a part of its soul always belonged to Baphomet. Now all I know is that if there are any deeper layers to this history, I don’t want to be sober when we hit them.

But let me back up first. We kill Kashtari. His ugly green-skinned corpse is laid out on the ground. Ezmerelda suggests searching his body for treasure, which is a bit creepy cause the Oni is stark naked and clearly not carrying treasure. No search is carried out (unless you count much later when I go back and rob him of 2 of his larger
teeth). Huge heavy double doors leading west are barred from this side and barricaded with a cheerful array of heavy furniture. Open Us, they say. A Short Happy Life Awaits. We do not.

The main wall of Kashtari’s dining room is a huge fresco. It’s considerably decayed with whole chunks of plaster fallen off, but it seems to depict the story of Gardmore Abbey. However where the plaster has fallen away we can see there is a much older painting underneath. One of a seated minotaur drinking from a huge tankard. Neil has a plausible argument for why this should be interpreted as a minotaur depiction of the god Moradin. This is strange, because as you the reader no doubt remember, the minotaurs here had claimed to be working to restore their former worship of Bahamut. But anyway.

We also find::

1) a chain of intertwined serpents marked with a symbol of the evil god Zehir. It is stubbornly unmagical but carved in jade and with eerie emeralds for eyes. I took it for safekeeping (after letting Splug stick a raven feather in it).

2) a golden chalice, which provoked the following discussion between Splug and… someone else, I forget.

someone: “What about that poisoned demon blood? You should put some of that in here and drink it.”
Splug (whispering loudly): “No, I’m going to get some other idiot to drink it!”

(…the astute reader may dwell here on the word “other”. )

3) fancy plates. Gold plated we think. Worth 25gp each although potentially more interesting for the fact that they carry the same sigil of Asmodeus’ Infernal Bastion. The sigil that’s on that rod that we found in Vaults. The rod that I’m carrying like its no big deal. Sir Oakley immediately objects to treating these plates as treasure and demands they be destroyed. To which Neil constructs this awesome argument of complete and utter horseshit, as to why the plates are really harmless and not at all demonic. I can’t do it justice here but Oakley buys it. The plates are stashed away for a rainy day and/or demonic picnic.

Now, I notice there’s another door, and since I feel at this point that I’ve been paying attention, I’m pretty sure this other door opens onto a room we’ve already cleared out. Before anyone can stop me, I open it, just you know, to confirm my theory. But on the other side is not the empty room I expect, but instead a room full of minotaurs, patiently waiting for this door to be opened. Oh Hi! And the Barl Gura. Hey What’s Up?

Now picture us, still a bit bloody perhaps from the minotaur we cut down just minutes prior. With Oakley in our vanguard, more than ready to keep up the slaying momentum. We take a hard line with the minotaurs. We say we don’t believe their story and that they should allow us to search their areas. Splunk chips in another one of his famous Sermons of Opportunity:

Splug: “Verily I say that whosoever walks with demons shall follow them into hell. But those who have been fooled can walk the other way. The demon Kashtari has fed upon your very souls but you can be redeemed if you cast out the demons among you and accept the true gods”.

There was quite a bit more but my memory fails me here. The minotaurs remained unconverted and in fact they send a little tough talk back at us – that we are in their domain and we should be happy to leave with our lives but apparently we are not.

“Happy” ? No, that doesn’t sound like us. At this point I’m not even sure “leaving with our lives” sounds like us.

Here just before battle was joined, Splug puts to voice the thought that no one was having: “Norbert would have liked to be here.”
Ezmerelda: “Who the hell is Norbert?”

—————–
Arranis opened by some kind of aspect of a dancing queen. It involved some peculiar little dance steps but it was quite effective. Later on his attacks got a bit more macho but as if to balance things out his rapier burst into flame .

Klajdu barreled his way early on into the middle of the minotaurs, did a great cleave, and then proceeded over the next 30 seconds to be gored, stabbed and slashed into a bit of a bloody mess. He took heavy damage but always dealt it back out in greater measure.

Ezmerelda did that crazy draconic roar again and scared the hell out of us.

Splug:”Has anyone thought we need to dispatch this [gestures at Ez] demonic thing?”
Shazia: “What her? She’s got all the skittles! Where the hell are we gonna get skittles down here?”

Neil focused some kind of discordant chords on a minotaur, making it blunder right over to me. Oh great. I didn’t get you anything.

Splug makes a particular minotaur into his Oath Of Enmity target, declaring “if you attack anyone but me, I will bathe you in fire”.
Calls Sir Oakley “What do you know of bathing, goblin?”
Splug calls back: “A lot! But, only with fire!”

The minotaur leader shoots lightning out of his glaive, drawing from Oakley and Shazia the first of several countershouts of “To Glaive”.

A minotaur at one point throws a handaxe at Ezmerelda and hits her so well the axe remained stuck in her leg.

Arranis: “The handle’s right there. It’s pretty easy to grab, unless you’re afraid of blood.”
Ezmerelda then gives Arranis a truly unsettling leer.

At one point when all of us but one are in a row facing the same direction: “What is this, Gardmore Abbey Road?”

—————–

The minotaurs go down after a fierce fight and we get another short rest. I have to apologize for having the Splug-style bad idea of opening the door. Oops. We search the room and the minotaurs. The Glaive turns out to be uninteresting once its owner is dead [“To Glaive”].

There’s a game table in the room, and a big relief carving on the wall of a female minotaur. Apparently it’s a minotaur depiction of the god Erathis and Oakley says this whole room was here, pretty much as we see it, before his people even took over the complex. Apparently minotaur devotees of Erathis would play some kind of games here. Arranis is himself a devotee of Erathis back in the Feywild and is fascinated to discover that other races here worship her as well.

We move on eventually and organize a search of the minotaur’s camp, which is a few underwhelming piles of rags and sacks in another room. The most interesting thing we find is a silver dagger with a large amethyst in its pommel. Oakley says this is a treasure of the ancient Gardmore Abbey. the human Gardmore, that is. Not the “Who-dont-we-worship” minotaur gardmore.

It is about this time that I screw up and make things much more complicated by finding a secret panel in the wall. Behind there is a chamber twenty feet wide by about sixty feet long. The air in there is stifling and oppressive and you feel like you’re in the presence of a huge sleeping beast. Mostly I think because you are.

The walls in this room are also decorated with more ancient carvings. But these are quite different. Demonic minotaurs committing brutal acts of savagery adorn this wall. Into the room a bit there is a statue of a horned god with gleaming topaz eyes. Baphomet . Oh holy hell.
It calls to mind the carvings we saw in Saruun Khel – that whole corridor of carvings showing a host of demonic minotaurs on one side of a battle, fighting non-demonic minotaurs allied with humans and dwarves and elves.

We’re all standing there trying to think and trying to absorb this new detail pretty much, when Arranis boldly crosses the room and tries to pry out the topaz eyes with a blade. Bold! Except that jets of fire shoot out and set him on fire. Before we get the fire put out and before we retreat to the outer room, Splug offers Arranis some deadpan advice from the world of disastrous dinner theater:

Splug: “you should just, you know, pee on it”

excerpt 25

So there we are. In the room we have Ezmerelda under the table, only just discovered by the half-gnoll half-minotaur Kashtari. We have Splug who had tried to enter the room stealthily and failed, and we have Neil who had strolled in after and tried to talk our way out of this mess. Outside of the room lurk the rest of us.

Splug recites an incantation and assumes a divine aspect. Since we mishear some key words, we believe that the power suffusing him is the “Aspect of Mike”. Thus for a while we will praise this unknown god for his impressive power and afterwards Splug will ruin it all by telling us it was only the “Aspect of Might”, and that Mike remains unmanifested and unknown.

Ezmerelda scowls and unleashes rainbow glitter fury at Kashtari. Her pockets overflow with little candies . She also begins hurling a nonstop telekinetic barrage of serving dishes at Kashtari. They do no damage but they add to the general comedy level in the room, which increases steadily.

One of the huge gnolls rakes his claws at Splug under the table, hits and does an immense amount of damage, bloodying him instantly. Someone sees the deadly nature of the attack and remarks “It could be a real short day.”

Splug however then uses his goblin tactics to counterattack this same gnoll and he scratches him on the knees a bit. Lacking any sense of proportion he capers and taunts the gnoll at this minor success.

Oakley charges into the room, leaving only Klajdu and myself outside. The two of us are caught a bit flat-footed outside the room. Well, Klajdu is. I am standing behind him having just filled a flagon with ale, having had the thought to empty it before there was any action to worry about.

Shazia: Hold on. I must drain my flagon of ale.
Klajdu: {turns around, brow furrowing}
Shazia: Why did you turn around!? You interrupted some very private flagon-draining!

Klajdu and I do finally make it into the room and we begin to chant a made-up battlesong that consists only of a repeated chorus of “Gnolls gnolls gnolls gnolls gnolls” in what I will unreasonably insist was perfect two-part harmony. Things continue to chart a course putting us somewhere between good sketch comedy and disastrous dinner theater.

Singing, I blip about the room and get Gnoll #2 to strike Gnoll #1 in an unlikely flank with Sir Oakley. Splug strikes Kashtari, teleports him sideways but then inexplicably falls unconscious himself. Neil blows a discordant blast on his horn which dominates the recently-teleported Kashtari, and Kashtari swings at Gnoll #2, who has just himself swung at Gnoll #1. Neil’s discordant blasts not surprisingly provide the perfect wacky theme music.

Ezmerelda scoots out from under the table and lets loose an unexpectedly deafening and draconic roar which hits Kashtari. Is nothing in this room what it seems to be?
As if in answer, more plates of food fling themselves at our enemies.
Kashtari confirms the creepy feeling that he’s not what he seems by breathing out a foul purple smoke once in a while. The smoke fills the room and makes it hard to do anything but retch.

Or lie unconscious, because Splug continues to miss out on the show by sleeping peacefully under the table. That is until kashtari kneels next to him and begins to do something magical. It looks bad, like Kashtari is eating Splug’s soul. Brave of him. But it pays off because Kashtari starts to look healthier.
Meanwhile Klajdu gets in the thick of the action and does a devastating Great Cleave. I teleport up on the table, dance a bit, teleport down amidst our foes, attack them and then teleport back onto the table, where I continue to do a bit of a drunken jig. Neil’s discordant blasts continue to really tie the scene together.
The giant minotaur grabs Ezmerelda and as she tries to break free, a plate of beets hurls itself uselessly at the minotaurs face. The minotaur then, less humorously, impales Ez on one of his horns. Gruesome but she survives somehow. I turn towards them and strike the minotaur with the Witchfire curse. He’s still killing Ez, but at least now he’s on fire so… partial credit?

Splug wakes up! And I think he got hit again by something.

Splug: Everyone hurts me in this room!
Ezmerelda: It’s because you’re so annoying.

The gnolls are felled eventually, and Kashtari more or less right then fades away into a vaguely visible mist, which tries to escape the room. We are having none of this and we throw everything we have at the mist, possibly including a plate of radishes. Eventually the mist yields but instead of there appearing the corpse of a giant half-minotaur half-gnoll called Kashtari, there is an equally large green-skinned thing with horns and white hair. It looks a little demonic although hell everything looks demonic to me these days.

There is still the little matter of the giant minotaur trying to kill us. Neil makes peace with the minotaur in an astonishing display of diplomacy, which at least partly involved a large cigar of some kind being extended as a peace offering.

The minotaur is blessed neither with any great intelligence nor any useful knowledge, but he is wise enough to accept the truce and the passed cigar. He tells us what we already know, that Kashtari was holding a precarious balance of power between the minotaurs here and the gnolls, and that the gient gnolls and giant minotaur were basically his lieutenants.
Oakley finally snaps though. Exasperated, he asks the minotaur “What is up with the demon?”, and when the nonchalant reply is “The demon is our ally.”, damn him if Oakley doesn’t just attack. We return to battle and dispatch the minotaur after a few hectic minutes.

Oh and before I forget, after much hemming and hawing we establish afterwards that Kashtari was in fact an Oni, a rare kind of creature that only a few of us have heard of, and that none had seen.