Here is the write-up from our fourth session with our Beginner Box Hack (from Austin). We finally had a full compliment of players as both Bridgett and RJ joined us for the first time, I think, in at least a month. Bridgett rolled up Shadow, a female elven ranger (it is soooo unlike her to play a ranger). RJ rolled up Dent, a male dwarven fighter.
Spoiler Alert: There are spoilers for the adventure Fangs from the Past published by 0one Games. My GM comments, as always, are in [italics and brackets] as usual.
[When we last left the party, they had just discovered what they hoped was the abode of the Sage of the Sundered Cliffs and had been chased inside by the attacks of the Sturgimate. Since they were, essentially, out in the middle of nowhere, I needed to work in Shadow and Dent somehow.]
A new figure entered the scene as Shadow mysteriously appeared, she claimed to have been hired by Lucent to find out what happened to us after we did not return for several weeks. [It was actually just over a week so far.] She stumbled upon us as we entered the tunnel in the cliffs. We quickly discovered a large opening with a frighteningly large exposure to the open sky. It was not long before the screams began – only this time it was not one of us but a stranger. Plummeting from the sky, a dwarf landed–painfully–on the ground before us. He called himself, appropriately enough, Dent and explained that his axe had stuck fast in a dragon and, rather than forsake it, he had held on for days until it shook free and he dropped in our laps.
[Dent’s fall knocked him unconscious and they learned his story after he was revived. His story was something of an inside joke. Way back when, a friend of ours moved out of town (one of many over the years) and would periodically come visit and want to play. So I came up with a character that–literally–dropped in and out of play. He was a dwarven fighter and, if you haven’t guessed it yet, his name was Dent. So I borrowed some of the same thoughts for bringing in this Dent…he was hunting dragons, got caught up in the scales of one that flew off (a big one at that), and finally got free to drop where he fell many, many miles from where he started. Meh…it is better than saying, “Um, yeah, this dwarf just shows up and wants to join you.” It was more amusing the first time around as our friend had a natural cluelessness that fit perfectly with the whole story that was missing this time around.]
After healing Dent, we set about exploring the opening but found little more than some old lamp posts and the remains of what might have been a garden in a more peaceful time. We located a large metal door, the metal was blackened but the lock was still shining silver. Aaron tried to hammer the lock on the door after searching for a key but coming up empty. As he pounded on the door, two of the lampposts animated, arms sprouting from their sides, and they swiftly charged him. Shadow killed one quickly as Aurora hacked at the second. As the rest of the group traded blows with the remaining lamppost, we were too distracted by Dent’s collapse from their attacks to notice that the other two had come to life!
One of the freshly “awakened” posts took me down quickly. Shadow and Aaron each dispatched one of the lampposts, and I rose to finally put down the last of them with a blast of freezing pain. Aaron returned to breaking down the door and, soon enough, it fell before his thunderous blows.
Inside was a room made of solid marble (as if cut from one stone, no seems – faaar superior to any dwarven craftmanship). A dragon relief was sprawled across the back wall, set above a half-filled pool of water. A large pipe ran from just below the dragons head into the pool and a small shaft led from above the pool into the stone above us. In the room was also a large blue-glowing globe firmly attached to a large stone pedestal. I moved to look up a ramp in the corner that led into darkness but was brutally struck by several spikes hurled through the air–and into my body. Dent pulled me to safety. A voice beyond the magical darkness called to us. We were convinced that it was the beast we had been hunting this whole time. It tried, rather unsuccessfully, to convince us it was actually the Sage of the Sundered Cliffs (and Dent seemed at least a little convinced if not a bit too willing to trust a mysterious voice in the dark).
Eventually the beast stopped speaking to us and did not answer any of our calls. After much debate and some attempts to remove the darkness, Dent and Aaron agreed to blindly explore the darkness. After a few moments, Dent and Aaron tripped over what we soon learned was once a body (at least according to the piece of leg Dent pulled off and brought back with him as the two retreated). Pushing back into the darkness, the pair reached the other side of the darkness and, deciding it was “safe” enough, they called us through.
Beyond was a large room with a tapestry, several hallways, a large table covered in smashed devices and shattered glass, and a large crystal growth which encased a sword deep inside of it. Lining the walls were shelves with ancient scrolls and books, now crumbling and turning to dust at the slightest touch. I poked my head under the tapestry and discovered an enormous door. [The door was also decorated with carvings–two dragons, two suns, grasses, a frog in the bottom corner (???), and some script that was not recognizable to any of the PCs.] Aurora determined that it is magical. In the center was a series of buttons with numbers–we guessed it to be a lock of some sort–but we had no idea what the combination might be and didn’t want to risk experimenting with it.
Exploring down one hallway, we discovered the Sage’s bedroom. The inside was simple enough – bed, desk, wardrobe. But we uncovered a tunic which was clearly magical, having not even worn with time, let alone completely fallen apart like the rest of the clothing. We also found a small pen knife; Aurora remembered a story of the Sage having a knife that could cut a piece of paper and provide an answer to any question he did not already know the answer to. [The bedroom also had a corridor leading to a door that opened out onto a small balcony overlooking the mountainside and an old chamberpot. Anothe small corridor led to a small peephole looking over the “ex-garden” that the party had originally entered.] We decided to barricade ourselves in his bedroom and rest for the night.
Thankful to wake in the morning, we prepared for the day and set back out into the hall. Aurora cast comprehend languages and read the door. [The script read, “Here lies the lord of this place. Enter and partake of his greatness.”] It was either an invitation or a warning (depending on how you interpreted “partake of his greatness”). Still not ready to tempt the door’s magic, we explored another hallway and found some old crates and jugs. Dent discovered a strange metal brush-like object and a container of grease. The metal object was magical so Dent dipped it in the container of grease he found it near and smeared some on the ground but nothing happened.
We moved back out into the “library” and investigated the last hallway and the crystal-bound sword. The sword appeared to have writing on it but the crystal distorted the word(s) too much to be readable. Shadow tapped the crystal and the words rippled outward through it but still remained undecipherable. Noticing the rays of sunlight shining in from the last [yet to be explored] hallway, Aaron grabbed his mirror and reflected the light onto the crystal at (Shadow or Aurora’s?) direction. At first nothing happened but then the crystal began to melt away revealing the sword beneath.
[As the crystal began to melt, Aaron heard a now familiar laugh from the corridor he was standing in front of. It was, of course, the Sturgimate standing–silhoutted in the sun–some hundred feet or so away. And that, as a proper cliffhanger, is where we stopped.]
