Letter 05: Hey! Bats my Pony

Dearest.
I'll stick this in with last night's letter as we are still stuck in the maze of passages under the shrine to Sarenrea. Although to be honest where we are is anyone's guess remembering that strange dislocation at the entrance and the HUGE River of FireTM that we found today. But I'm getting ahead of myself. let me begin at the beginning.

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After a restful night, well as restful as you can get with a pile of dismembered skeletons lying scattered outside the door, and with only trail rations to eat, we returned to the large pillared all we reached yesterday [1]. However this time something was enjoying something more than trail rations. A huge tentacled beast was gnawing away at the remains of the ghouls we had killed. I now know why you always tell me to clear way my leftovers. The creatures tentacles were waving around and managed to paralyse one of us. I was too busy peppering it with crossbow bolts to see who it was and it took many strikes to kill it off. I hope we don't meet too many more of those. We gave the room a good search and discovered one of the doors was false, just a painting on the stone. Very odd, why would anyone go to the trouble of doing that?

So we headed up the wide passage to the north and tried the right hand door. We opened it and a swarm of bats bore down on us. I ducked out the way but others weren't so quick. There was much flailing around and screams of "They're in my hair" as the thousand or so bats attacked us, getting into crevices and sucking blood. Lady Helena came up with the clever but rather distasteful method of summoning a pony into the centre of the swarm and letting the bats eat that while we threw acid, oil and Alchemist's Fire at the swarm. Obviously accidents happened and one or two of us got splashed with the fluids as well. After what seemed like hours we managed to rid ourselves of the bats and moved on.

We found numerous doors that were stuck or possibly barricaded [J], often with a foul noxious stench beyond them. Sometimes if members of the team sniffed a little too hard it was enough to sicken them. Nice. We left these doors and continued along the passage to the west which turned north and then east. As it continued to the east we saw a light and a felt the air getting warmer. Eventually we found ourselves on a cliff edge over looking a chasm filled with a river of lava. Across the chasm a pair of huge fire giants stood guard at a set of bronze doors, polished to a high sheen with a huge screaming face embossed on them. There was once a bridge across the chasm but that had topped into the river of lava below many years ago by the look of things.

On this side of the ravine there was a pair of doors decorated with dolphins with handles in the form of silver dolphins. Opening the doors we found ourselves in a large chamber [2] decorated with a mosaic of, yes, dolphins. A door led east and a fireplace, with carved daemons holding pitchforks stood in the south west corner. In front of this oddly placed structure was the skeleton of a halfling. I determined that this fireplace concealed a hidden doorway and discovered the way of opening it, twisting the pitchfork held by the daemon.

The secret doorway led to a small chamber [3] dominated by a fountain carved to resemble a leaping tiger and a door set into the west wall. As we studied these a spider dropped down upon us. In the confined space, with difficult access it was very hard to kill it but we eventually managed it. The water appeared to be normal and Kisarra filled her water-skin with it.

Our luck with pits continued in the next chamber we entered. A bare ten foot square chamber [4]. The south door from this chamber had a iron grill at head height above which was written "Speak Fiend and Enter". We spotted that the room was trapped and tried to spike the trap. We said 'Fiend' in some arcane tongue and heard a ticking sound so we all ran out until it stopped. When it had stopped we returned and tried to open the door. However we obviously got something wrong as the floor collapsed and Ziyana and I fell into a 20' pit with nasty spikes at the bottom. Fortunately I missed the spikes but Ziyana got impaled on two of them. We pulled her up and healed her before leaving the door, which was jammed, and instead tried to enter via the door in the fountain room. After much bashing the door was destroyed and we were faced by a primitive lizardman which exuded the foul stench that affected us earlier. There were others in there and a long tense battle ensued.

The chamber [5] contained a flat topped stone tomb, devoid of writing and decoration. The room may once have held tapestries on the wall but no longer. The creatures had no treasure apart from crude copper medallions showing a crowned crow on a red background.

We returned to the earlier jammed doors and bashed those down but as we did we were assaulted from inside by the same lizard creatures, Miria identified them as troglodytes.

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. This time instead of crude clubs they had short swords that they thrust through gaps in the wooden doors.
Again the creatures had barricaded the doors to the chamber [6] but had nothing of interest on them other than the medallions, which we took.

Leaving through the east door we came to a strange room with a sloping floor [7]. The north door led to a bare ten foot square chamber [9] while there were deep gouges around the doorway to the south which was well above the floor which sloped downwards towards this end. Ziyana found a lever behind a panel but we left it alone. We discovered that there was a gap around three of the sides (apart from the south end) but we couldn't quite work out what was going on. Perhaps it is an platform that gives access to the lower levels?

We continued east along a short corridor to what appeared to be an empty bunk room. Several neat and tidy bunks, a table with an ornate chair, a mismatch set of stools and a chest as an extra seat filled much of the room [8]. We had a quick explore which disturbed some oil beetles which we killed quickly. The chest was empty apart from some torches and candles but had the letters "f u g e e R" carved into the lid. We puzzled this for a while before one of us spotted that it was an anagram and cried out "Refuge". As they did so the doors locked, torches appeared in the sconces on the walls and a fine meal with wine and ale appeared on the table. It appears that this chamber is a place of safety amongst the hazards of the dungeon.

We decided to rest and build up our strength before moving on as we are no nearer to finding the lyrics to Anders' song, nor working out what happened to Carsten or who the Crimson King and the Black Queen are. However we are starting to accumulate some treasure including numerous gold and silver coins and an enchanted shield. Far too big for me but I may be able to persuade someone to let me cut it down to size.

Laters.
GG

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