In the mysterious continent of Xendrick, the adventuring party came across a very old abandoned tower. The only way into the tower was a long sloping tunnel that turned out to be trapped and filled with a deadly poison and the numerous corpses of the previous adventuring parties. Of course, if you are a D & D adventurer, such a tunnel is not going to scare you off. It is going to irresistibly pull you in.
After nearly dying on three different attempts to get through the tunnel, Gandy Rumspot, the halfling rogue and thief, realized that it was a poison gas in the tunnel. So he sent Big Cogwheel, the warforged artificial man who didn’t need to actually breathe air, to use his natural immunity to poison to go down and open the tricky invisible door and gain access to the tower.
Voila! On to further tricks and traps. At one point, exploding skeleton warriors animated by necromantic trap spells nearly killed Cog the warforged (by rolling a twenty on an attack roll) and required a miraculous magical repair by Gandy to save him. That left the big metal man with a permanent irrational fear of skeletons.
Along the way, they encountered and had to overcome a bound female demon who had been imprisoned in the tower to keep watch over the property. She was the slave of the Wizard Crane, builder of the tower long ago, who had then gone abroad and died in his semi-noble quest to slay a devil. She told the adventurers a great deal about her former master and her imprisonment, monologuing as villains will before killing and eating the adventurers. She overdid it, though, accidentally revealing the presence in the room of the devil jar that enslaved her, and even more stupidly, revealing how to activate the jar to physically seal her inside like a genii in a lamp.
Finally, they found the teleport room in the top of the tower which zapped them to the dungeon under the earth where Crane’s ultimate treasure was kept. It turned out to be a crystal ball which contained all the knowledge, memories, and experiences of Crane himself. In fact, Crane’s entire life up to the point where he left on his fatal adventure took the form of Crane’s imprisoned self, longing to have someone to talk to again after hundreds of years of loneliness. This proved to be a great boon to the magic users in the party, especially the half-elven wizardess Drualia. So that adventure left the adventuring team with more than a mere heap of experience points. It also gained them a crystal ball with an imprisoned sorcerer in it to talk too much and complain too much and teach them exotic and dangerous magic spells.
Like any three-session D & D adventure, this one was probably a lot more entertaining to play than it was to retell, but there it is, complete with the secrets that kept my players thinking about them for more than three weeks.
My wife constantly tells me I am wrong… about everything. And I probably am. So that is not right. And if you think that’s my wife in the picture, you would be wrong. She’s much larger than that in real life.
The Waning of September
The pool removal has finally begun. As I write this, I can hear the machinery grinding away at the gunite. And so, September has almost ended. It has not been a good time.
The world has been filled with the fetid orange-faced swamp monster in charge of our nightmare future raging against football players while an Asian nuclear baby Godzilla trades insults and threats of Armageddon with him as the sideshow. My health has been seriously threatened by chest pains and breathing difficulties made worse by all the stress brought on by my battles with the city over the pool. How many more years of this can the world actually withstand? How many more can I hold on to life and love and laughter?
But it is not over yet. I can still write. I can still laugh. I can still make goofy WordPress posts with autumn leaves and regal fritillary butterflies to make me feel better. And I can still put together novels that make stories worth telling. That is enough for the moment.
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