THIS TOO IS MEANINGLESS (A play report.)
This was a one-shot run by Glass Candles for yours truly and Bamzolino, who as far as I know has no blog to link here.
To my brother LIZARD MYSTERIOUS
Ain't sent you a letter in a while. You know I'd have writ back faster, but you know how long it takes for the packet ships to get from here to the Coast. I still can't believe I'm going to be an actual uncle! I've been holed up in a town called Langueforche for a while, a mean little church town full of Yellow Heretics, but trying to escape the wheel of samsara doesn't stop em from drinking shine, so an honest Harvestman like myself can make a decent living. I'll tell you one thing: if the G_ds wanted us to make a Church, they'd have told us before they left. I also picked up a local weapon, a real long sword they call the long falx. Seven feet of blade, three feet of handle- you'd love it. Damn hard to work with though. You have to go through doors sideways to fit it.
You know how I am, can't keep out of action for long. So when I heard that Amia, the Golden Abbot (who tends to all the monks' mortal needs, I'm told) and actual leader of the town, had a bandit problem and was paying to have it fixed, I couldn't help but get interested. A bunch of bandits led by this Shee named Wardlaw (or something like that) were going around raiding villages and managed to get their teeth kicked in on the last one, and the rumor said they were hiding out in some old ruins, so you know I had to get involved. I went out to this last village they raided, called Paris (but this is Arel so they say it like Paree), joined by this local who was the Abbot's niece. She was called Ariadna and was one of their crazy Yellow paladins, all fixated on escaping the world and feeling pain and causing pain and all that. She was on some funny mushrooms at first so she didn't talk much. Thank G_d. Sadly that changed later.
I showed up to Paris on my horse with this crazy lady behind me- not much of a town besides some houses, a tavern and stable, and one of their Yellow churches. Their leader was a guy named Guy who ran the bar, so I went there first and asked around for him and made some jokes about him being a guy named Guy. You would've found it real funny. Anyways, I got to talking with him, and I learned that twelve of these bandits showed up to town, and eight of them got killed by a bum who was sleeping in the corner- this hobo could turn into a beast, Guy told me. So I walked up to him and gave him one of my bottles of the good stuff, and when he woke up and started drinking I got him to help me clear these bandits out for his own cut of the bounty. This fellow- Nout, his name was- agreed to go but wasn't very patient, so he went running out the door and I had to follow him out.
We followed the trail the bandits left till we came to this odd old well, going down as far as I could see- when we went down the ladder, I reckon it had to be five hundred feet deep. There was no light down at the bottom, but Nout could see in the dark as well as I can and Ariadna brought torches, so we were all right when it came to that. This first room didn't have anything in it, just two halls going left and right. I heard talking and saw fire light coming from the left one, so I went over there and listened. There were three of em in there, talking about hiding out for a while, so I figured they were the bandits we were looking for. I ran in and tossed a bottle of shine on their campfire, which blew up real nicely. One of em was killed right then and there, one of em was lucky and didn't get hit, and the third, a scarred Shee that I figured was the leader, took a little glass and fire but stayed on his feet. The unhurt one ran up and tried to gut me with his sword, but I was fast on my feet and he cut nothing but air. I tried and hit him with a bottle so I could push him into the campfire, but I was a little blinded on account of the big fireball I just made and missed too. Ariadna stood there looking at the lights- I don't think she knew what was going on. Then Nout came forward, and his hand turned to an honest to G_d tiger claw, and he just about tore the poor bastard's face off. When the Shee, Wardlaw, saw this, he ran off through another hall and I can't blame him for it. The poor bastard with the ripped off face tried to beg for mercy, but they were wanted dead or alive and I chose dead. I made it quick and burnt the bodies so they wouldn't rise again.
We followed where the Shee went and found the next room, and this one was a real oddity. There was a pillar in the middle with a skinny grey man with ruby eyes chained to it, and when I looked over him with my Wizard eyes I could tell he wasn't really alive; he was some kind of made-thing, a fake man built with alchemy. The clay man asked us to free him, and said he'd give us money and magic if we did. He was odd and kind of crazy but he didn't seem to mean any harm, so I was going to let him out. Then Ariadna finally came to and decided she wanted to rip his eyes out before we freed him, on account of I don't know. Yellow heretics aren't just crazy, but mean bastards too. The chains were magic ones made of sacred Bronte steel, so I couldn't do it myself, and she had a lump of Adamant steel that was cursed as all Hell but awfully sharp. So she took his eyes out, which he didn't seem to mind much, and broke his chains. The clay man said a whole lot of things about wanting to see the sun, and seeing a Bad Man, and a lot of crazy nonsense like that while he crawled around on the floor. I felt bad for him, but we still had a job to do. There was another hallway deeper in, so we kept going.
The next room was a chemistry lab like the one I have, only all decayed and molded. I was going to look through it for things I could make into bombs and other good stuff, then Ariadna decided to kick over a table covered in old rotten books and paper. Turns out it was full of zygantes, those mean bastard bugs the size of a terrier you got in your cellar last year. There was three of them and three of us, but those bugs bit the Hell out of Nout and Ariadna. We killed one of em, but then out of another hallway came Wardlaw with another bandit, and he was carrying a spear with a tip made of that blessed ossgold. Well, I had my long falx out already, and they were pretty close together, so I pulled a pretty good trick. I used my magic to destroy the distance between me and them- one second I was standing there in the middle of the room, the next I was behind them. I made a pretty good swing with my falx and cut em both down the middle. Two in one blow- I ought to get that one stitched on a belt. Well, after that the other two finished the bugs off pretty handily, since they were just bugs no matter how bad tempered they were, and we got back to looking around the room. I chopped Wardlaw's head off before I burned him and his friend, so I could prove he was dead.
This part is gonna scare the Hell out of you, cause it scared the Hell out of us. I found this bookshelf on the wall, and saw through the holes rotted in it that there was a room behind it like in one of those cheap novels. I pulled it down and found a passage behind, and I went down there myself to check if it was just one room or a whole other level to the place. I swear to G_d I'm telling the truth, but when I went down there I was standing face to face with a cobold. The worst kind of restless dead there is, all dried up and oil-black with his jaw halfway hanging off. I lost my damn mind and ran away, screaming bloody murder to Nout and Ariadna to get fire because there was a cobold down there about to tear us up like paper dolls. The cobold tried to make a deal: he'd trade us knowledge for Wardlaw's head. Now, I'm a Wizard but I'm not going to make deals with an insane corpse, so I got Nout to give me the half-drank bottle of moonshine I gave him earlier so I could stuff some paper down the neck to make a firebomb out of it. I promised the corpse I'd make a deal if it would just come out of its room. I said I'd throw it the head, but I threw the liquor bomb at it instead and set it on fire. Now, it didn't like that, but it liked it even less when Ariadna ran it through with a harpoon and stuck it to the wall. I tried to stab it with the spear Wardlaw had, since the ossgold tip would burn a walking corpse like the sun would, but the cobold was a slippery little bastard and nearly pulled it out of my hands. Nout grabbed the harpoon so Ariadna could try and use the spear, but she wasn't any better with it than I was and nearly lost it too. Since I couldn't think of anything better, I smashed a bottle of perfume (don't ask why I had that) on the corpse, since perfume is full of spirits like liquor is and burns well. Then in a fit of panic, the corpse snapped the harpoon and tried to run off to its room. I tried to catch it in the legs with my falx, but it was too hard to swing in that passage and I damn near hit the floor instead. Ariadna pulled out another spear, this one with barbs on it, and pinned the corpse again with a lucky hit. Nout got lucky too, grabbing the broken off wooden part of the harpoon and throwing it through the cobold's shoulder. The damn thing was burning and nearly dead, but it still grabbed Ariadna to try and kill her. I cut the thing's arm off with my falx, and Nout finished it off with his claws. He was halfway turned to a tiger that whole time, but I was so fixed on that dead man that I forgot to write it until now. That thing will be in my dreams for a while. I tell myself that the G_ds left to test us, but horrors like that make me wonder. Maybe this time we passed, but I think we were one stroke of bad luck away from getting ripped apart.
We searched the dead man's secret room, and found a strange book, his diary, a Yellow snake mask, and a little pile of money that we split up. I kept the books and let Ariadna keep the ossgold spear, figuring she'd earned it even if she was crazy and irritating. The book was some kind of messed up fairy tale, but his diaries were real interesting- evidently he tried to make the anti-CHAOS part of gold and the sun into a potion and drink it so he could make his body pure and escape samsara. Seeing as he was a screaming insane corpse living under a well, I don't think it worked but it was a good read still. I guess he must have been a Yellow heretic once. Better luck next time on the wheel, bastard.
Anyways, when I brought Wardlaw's head to the Abbot, we each got paid twenty Glass Pieces. G_d damn cheapskate. She actually had to convince Ariadna against burying all her money in a hole, since Yellow Heretics hate the material world so much they actually want to make it worse. I think Ariadna didn't believe that as much as she said she did, though- it seemed like a lot of that crazy stuff she said and did was to convince herself, not just others. Dealing with these people is an experience I have a lot of choice words for, but seeing as I'm now a real uncle, I think that maybe I should hold off on the obscenity.
We never figured out where the clay man went when we left. He just up and disappeared when we went back to look for him. I'm pretty sure he's out wandering the wilderness of Arel, but I'd like to find him sooner rather than later. I'm sure he has his uses, even if he's blind.
Well, I'm running out of paper and I have to check on my still, so I'll end this here.
Looking for my own escape,
FIVE GLASS UNCLE DENIZ
All in all, it was a very fun session. The dungeon itself was actually a very abbreviated one, made for a challenge to fit an entire dungeons text in one discord post. The cobold fight was scary as Hell; we were well equipped to deal with it, but a cobold can make four attacks in a round in a game where I had six hit points and no armor to speak of, although Nout and Ariadna were a little more sturdy than I was on account of class choice. We were rolling 20 after 20 on the dicebot, like when I cleaved two bandits in half and Ariadna kept pinning the cobold to the wall; Nout also critted one of the zygantes, but they're basically trash mobs of the underground so it was complete overkill. He turned that bug into a stain on the floor.
Going forward, we plan (tentatively) to make this a campaign of one-shot dungeon crawls. In my typical technique of stealing prose from the Bible, I have titled it THIS TOO IS MEANINGLESS. Looking at how the alchemist's plan worked out, I think you guys can guess why.
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