Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.
3 Kuthona 4709
Snowy mountains… somewhere
As my companions collected equipment off of the dead kobolds, I opened the sack, which had begun to inch away from the activity. Out popped the head of a bound and gagged hairless albino humanoid with large red eyes. I pulled the gag from its mouth after letting it know we were rescuing it, and it replied with the most ear-splitting scream from between rows of razor-sharp teeth. I was going to put the gag back in its mouth till it calmed down, but I did not need to, as the paladin whacked it on the back of the head with his sword, knocking it out. Once it stopped screaming, I recognized it as a morlock— a degenerate subterranean humanoid. The always-kindly Tythe suggested we untie it and leave it outside of the room we were in, locking the door behind it so that if it started screaming, it would not draw an army of morlocks to us. We did just that, and then had enough uneventful time to rest properly.
After resting, we decided to continue checking the rooms beyond the great hall where we’d camped. We found a shrine to the dwarven god Torag, many rooms of barracks, and a dining hall. Then Tythe found some barrels and a chest, though the chest turned out to be a creature. It opened its mouth, two lines of sharp teeth appearing where the “lid” had been and whipped out a sticky tendril, catching Tythe and pulling her towards its gaping maw. It also had the audacity to grab Rogar’s favorite waraxe. Thankfully we were able to slay it and get both the elf and the axe back relatively unharmed.
We then wandered down a hall, set off an ice water trap (no one got splashed) and went through some double doors into a huge round and very deep stairway/room. The stairs circled around the edge. We carefully made our way down, taking note of the arrow slits in the walls. The dwarf and I took point, since we could see well enough in the dark, but Rogar managed to fall into a pit that appeared underneath him. I got hit by a few arrows as my companions tried to pull him out. I know at least one of the arrows I was hit with was poisoned; I think Salma got hit with one as well. We managed to run across the room, with a few more pits opening up under us and more arrows crisscrossing our paths. Candal pulled Rogar from the pit while Tythe picked a lock on the far side of the room. I ran back to lead them through a non-pit laden path to relative safety and we exited the room together.
3 Kuthona 4709
Snowy mountains… somewhere
We healed up in the tiny room, which had one other door. We went though it into yet another small room with yet another extra door. And so on… until we started to hear the doors closing behind us. Of course, they had no visible hinges, handles or locks. We then heard a cry for help beyond the next door. Figuring we’d be going forward anyway, we went through, trying (and failing) to hold the door behind us open. When we got to the last visible door and opened it, Kasa bounded through before I could stop her and came out carrying a gnome, as if they were old friends. Stranger still, some of my companions already knew the gnome sorceress Liake, and did not seem overly surprised to find her in a small, closed room in a mountain someplace that we could not identify. Perhaps all bad teleports go here.
As Candal started the monumental task of chipping away each stone door with an axe, I asked Liake if she had any spells that might help (figuring she did not, else she would not have been calling for help). She in fact did have a spell that was simply for opening doors such as these, and had the rest of the doors open in a minute.
Having not found a way out of our predicament, we found ourselves one door from the “firing squad” room again. We found two more doors across the room from ours, and took turns running across the open space to check them. One turned out to be a similar set of useless doors and rooms like the ones we’d just spent time in; the other was full of refuse. We had to opt for the refuse, hoping there would be another door beyond the waist-deep waste.
We had to dart quickly to the room, and unfortunately Rogar’s donkey “Seven” ended up being a shield for our cleric, dying before Salma had a chance to try and save it.
We got our bearings in the stink-infested room, only to discover that it was already occupied by an otyugh. While not at all surprising to find one there, we were still stuck fighting it. Liake tried various spells such as a summoned fire elemental while the rest of us hit it with weapons. In the end though, it died by a magic missile.
We’ve sifted through the debris and offal without finding another door. We did, however, find some brass pipes to summon rats with (not sure why we would do that) and of interest to me, a broken Mwangi spear of good craftsmanship, inlaid with gold and with an obsidian tip. I wonder if it could be fixed….