What Do I Know?

If you read this blog  (and I know there might actually be one or two that do . . . I think), then you may have noticed the death of my dearly beloved Rhulic merchant, accountant, trader, bounty hunter, and mercenary, Jurg Cragscale.  By a ghost.  In the basement of our new headquarters.

So far the team has yet to replace the company treasurer.  Admiral Doctor Sir Titimus, our Gobber, is a little too eager to take the position, so the rest of the team has been resistant to his offers.

By decree of the Stonegrinder Irregular’s captain, the party decided to rest a bit and hire a few more hands before exploring the ruins more fully, and potentially clearing them out.  This led to hiring our Trollkin, who actively hates Khadorans, and who has no language in common with anyone.

He arrived on the barge, not able to actually talk to the captain, and began eating food.  Our support Gobbers could speak with him, but that made translations a bit shaky.

While the Trollkin was “introducing” himself to our captain, Dahlia and Titimus found my new character, the dashing, handsome, and somewhat on the run Khadoran mercenary Alexi, and his traveling companion, the alchemist and somewhat thief-like Anastasia.  We were eating in a fine establishment in Five Fingers, living off the allowance that Alexi’s mother sends him.

Thankfully, Alexi and the Trollkin share a language in common.  Alexi, he is not so good with nuance, so he has not fully picked up on the fact that the Trollkin hates him with a burning passion.  Alexi is a bit thick witted, but ever so charming, so I’m sure eventually he’ll make the Trollkin forget the slaughter of his people.  That stuff never lasts.

At any rate, new people hired, bad translations made, the Stonegrinder Irregulars set off to explore their own basement again.

Going further than we did last time, where the heart and soul of the team, dear departed Jurg died, we discovered a room with a pit and spikes.  Alexi’s exuberant spirit infected the whole team, and rather than looking for mechanisms that might trigger a pit trap or the floor to drop out, we threw some boards over the pit and walked across.

Still exuberant, we found a wall that we brute force levered up off the ground, and despite signs that other similar contraptions had broken nearby, we shoved some debris under the door after we levered the door up off the ground and went still further into the Basement of Ancient Dooms.

Titimus and Dahlia were watching behind us while the rest of us bravely and valiantly explored a hallway full of doors.  And by bravely and valiantly, I mean that most of the time the Trollkin and Alexi would walk up to the door, wait for anyone else to tell them not to do so, and proceed to break the door down, either with an axe or a blasting pike.

Ghosts showed up and moved the makeshift bridge we made.  We decisively stayed in the tomb as this happened, as if to show the ghosts we weren’t afraid to join them.  Their counterpoint to this particular non-maneuver maneuver was to knock the supports holding the door that we leveled up off the ground out of the way, trapping us further into the tomb.  Well played ghosts . . . I don’t know how we could have seen that gambit coming  (at least, Alexi wouldn’t have).

After breaking down several doors, including a door that probably led to a stash of evil Orgoth artifacts  (which none of us could identify), which cannot now be closed, we continued our tactic of opening every door in the dungeon so as to allow for maximum possibilities for exploration.  Or something.  Alexi is pretty sure that the point of the exercise is to free everything, find a defensible position with a bottleneck, and fight the entire dungeon at one time, with himself and the Trollkin as the battlements for the rest of the party to shoot around.  It’s not like that wasn’t how he was used in the Khador military.

The group ended up with most of the doors behind us broken open, sealed in this part of the tomb, in a room filled with fear gas.  We have these ghosts right where we want them!