GONZO TEMPLE: Flawless victory, flawless victory, flawless victory

The soon-to-be-infamous Area 32, never searched
or explored by the PCs. Gnash!

Pho scouted the hallway beyond the secret door, coming back with the news that a grate dropped from the ceiling blocked further progress. “I could probably do something about it if I had time,” she added, “but I could hear movement. However we open this thing, we have to plan to be attacked.”

A very brief flex-off made Vig the obvious choice to yank on the grate. Kedrin would assist, and be ready to heal him as events dictate. Pho, Zeppo and Mojo would stay back with ranged weapons ready – Mojo insisted his fingers were his weapons – and the group moved quickly into position behind the grate.

The grate had been crafted by a dwarven trapsmith, so it was no easy thing to break even its weakest piece. Vig pulled, and pulled, his greenish skin growing dark with the effort, his lips pulled back from his tusks. It would not budge.

A bored gnoll poked its head around the corner, took a moment to gulp with surprise, and howled; the howl turned into something from nightmare, his doggy yawp rising and rising into a scream of pain – for in the moment of that gnoll's howl, Mojo revealed what “my fingers are my weapons” really means.

A brief szzzzt accompanied a shaft of opaque, yellow-white light painted into reality by a gesture and word from Mojo – the shaft there one moment, connecting Mojo's hand with the chest of the gnoll, then gone. It left the gnoll in flaming agony and Mojo's place in the group ensured. Mercifully, the beast swooned from the agony and the screaming stopped. Beyond, the unmistakeable sounds of mobilization were plain.

Now time was of the essence. Vig hauled on the grate once more, twice more, straining terribly, and several gnolls moved into view, filling the hallway, moving with purpose and discipline. Vig pulled again, and no sooner did the grate release with a metallic thwang than Zeppo's entangle spell went off in the midst of the gnoll platoon.

Look away now, gentle reader, for this fight is less fight and more slaughter. Ignore the screams and the cries for mercy (even the ones that you understand, the way Pho understood the leader-gnoll cursing the clerics who declined to come to their aid). The gnolls, mired in vegetation that meant them ill, were picked off by the party easily – crossbow bolt, arrow, scorching ray, panther attack, gnome/bear attack – in the end, the gnolls simply met a force vastly more powerful, with predictable results.

The party pressed the advantage after the entangle spell stopped making the corridors a writhing mess. With their gnoll guards gone, the clerics withdrew into a deeper part of the complex, leaving the party to thoroughly loot their quarters without resistance. “See what I'm always saying? Evil is for wussies,” Kedrin opined. “No way I'd leave all my loot and notes and just go down in the dungeon. Weak. Now I want to kill them just on principle.”

Several lighted, formerly occupied rooms were now empty; these rooms were searched with obsessive exactitude, yielding a scroll, some coin, and another journal – this from someone named Geynor Ton. Ton (the journal revealed) is nominally in charge of what the letters call 'the dig.' He rants crazily about his feelings about his troglodyte peer (negative) and the Dark One (positive). He also points the party in the direction of Rastor – apparently the place they've been putting off traveling toward is the best place to contact this cult. “Guess we know where we're going once we're done here,” Zeppo joked, to shrugging looks of acceptance from all.

The only directions left are into the unlighted areas the clerics and gnolls weren't inhabiting. Two options presented themselves: A pitch-dark hallway, or a narrow staircase chipped out of solid rock. The group chose darkness, countering with light of their own, and alerted a group of ghouls hiding in a crypt at the end of the hallway.

The ghouls slid noiselessly out of hiding places, striking at Vig, who moved in the vanguard. Kedrin again channeled the light of Pelor, and the ghouls fell back from him in dismay. Again the party met a foe it could destroy with impunity, and set to the task with brutal efficiency – until Mojo spoke up, his voice cracking with hesitancy: “Hey, uh – don't kill that last one.”

Baffled, everyone paused, with Kedrin huffing in annoyance. Mojo sauntered forward, held his hand out to the ghoul, and then said a few quiet words: “Hey, buddy. Hey there. Let's go down this way, yeah?”

Meekly, the ghoul turned and followed Mojo out of the crypt. Mojo motioned for everyone to follow; whatever their feelings at that moment, everyone did. In silence, the living followed the dead out of the crypt and, at Mojo's prompting, down the narrow stairway into a colder darkness.

Mojo's gambit paid off immediately. Halfway down the long stairs, another ghoul burst from hiding to attack the sorceror, but his charmed ghoul intervened. The breath the group had been holding was suddenly let loose, and laughter rang down the stairwell. Figuring their cover blown, the group took a moment for a little side-wagering while the ghoul-on-ghoul violence lasted. After that fight, Kedrin pulled everyone together (“May the Light of Pelor shine upon us this hour”) - and blessed all and sundry - even the ghoul-befriending new guy.

Which left the clerics somewhere down the stairs – at least three, since the skinny, pale girl had never returned, and Geynor Ton had mentioned himself and a troglodyte. The room the clerics chose for their last stand was strange – 30 feet square, but with an 8-foot hole in the center of the room. A small stream of water ran from a crack at the base of one wall, meandering to the hole, whence it trickled into darkness. The final oddity was a simple, hand-operated elevator platform; now raised near the ceiling, it was clear the platform was designed to allow people to lower themselves into the blackness below.

Of course, these details barely registered to the blessed, battle-frenzied folks who poured in to challenge the clerics. Their attention was focused solely on the three figures in ochre robes now moving into action: All were casting spells, but the humans in the corners were still as they did so; the trog was not still, drifting forward over the hole, clearly buoyed by levitation magic.

Take one last loving glance at these antagonists. Imagine their fury and frustration at the ruin of their plans. Imagine, further, their arrogance, these people who have given up simple sanity for the promise of some greater payoff, something darker and far longer-lasting. Imagine them swearing to bring the party into the embrace of their Lord.

Now, imagine all of that undone; imagine their shattered minds exposed to the horrible gaze of their dread lord; imagine their agonies stretched into infinities, forever. Half a minute in the same room with Vig, Kedrin, Zeppo, Pho and Mojo, and their undoing was complete.

Vig shook off the initial fusillade of spells, protected by his rock-ribbed common sense and his years of training, and the group took advantage of the clerics' wasted opening. A sequence of blows from the massive half-orc left Geynor Ton reeling; his attention turned to Vig, he didn't notice Pho sliding behind him until her rapier-tip burst through his capacious gut, signalling the commencement of his eternity in Tharizdun's embrace. The skinny girl didn't fare much better, getting torn to shreds by Badger.

The levitating troglodyte, though, had the foresight to keep himself away from the fray from the beginning, thinking to lob spells while his movement advantage kept him safe. He didn't figure upon the sheer incendiary power of Mojo's scorching ray, though – the first changed his focus from 'destroy' to 'escape,' and the second ended him.

Zeppo hopped off the floor and changed into an eagle to scout down in the darkness. After confirming that the troglodyte was indeed dead, the group – its spell lists depleted and generally weary beyond understanding – decided to pack up their loot and head for home. Well, Hommlet, anyway.

OOC: Yes, the PCs got to the huge obelisk room in the moathouse, didn't explore it quite all the way, and left without knowing there was more weird shit down there. I'm posting the map of the room that into which Zeppo flew there at the end, primarily to taunt the players that they meeesed that sheeeet, mang.

GONZO TEMPLE: Introducing Mr. Mojo Risen

“... so then I met up with Spugnoir here, and we got down to looking for these weeds he was collecting,” said Mojo, grease from a spit of squirrel-meat dripping off his fingers and face. The pair of them, the sorceror Mojo and apothecary Spugnoir, ate like men who'd been trapped for two days in a room guarded by snappish gnolls and filled only with broken bits of furniture, fittingly. Apparently they'd eaten a rat at one point, which Mojo had “accidentally cooked” from across the room.

The entire experience had been shattering for Spugnoir, Hommlet's potion-master, who wanted nothing more than to return home as quickly as possible. “I must away. My daughter's alone!” he said, sounding panicked, but Pho had comforting words. “Your daughter's Renne, right?” she offered, smiling a bit. “She's fine. Better than fine. She's worried about you, though.”

News of his daughter's resourcefulness seemed to shame the potion-maker a bit; after the exchange, all he could talk about was returning home, “as soon as possible, risks be damned.” Mojo had different ideas: “I'm gonna stay with these folks,” he countered. “I'm not from around here.” What he didn't say was “the answers I need don't lie at the bottom of a potion bottle.”

So, once the food was eaten, Pho and Zeppo scouted the stairs and moathouse. Finding no dragon, they sent Spugnoir on his way. “Look me up in town,” he said just prior to vanishing along the trail to Hommlet. “I'd be honored to repay your kindness with my craft.”

Here, then, is the group: Pho, bold and inscrutable; Kedrin, upright and confident; Zeppo, gleefully vicious atop his big cat; Vig, obdurate and meditative; and this new fellow, Mojo – whose entire affect seemed off-kilter, whose clothing looked outlandish even to worldly Pho, and whose ability to assist the group was in some question. The earlier quartet edged closer together in the discussion that followed, herded by the feeling that the new guy wasn't from around here.

For his part, Mojo was struggling with a rising tide of panic. He'd fallen asleep at home, in the Suzerainty of Glin-Bermont; he'd dweomered his Tik-Tok Timepiece to awake him just before dawn; he laid upon his canvas cot for some time, thinking over the Orders of Binding, worried about the next day's test. And then he'd awoken here, this somewhere else – at least he thought so – in the woods. He'd wandered about for a few minutes before finding Spugnoir, who insisted on checking him for head wounds after his questions. “Glinbermon? Academy of Thoth?” he'd repeated, clueless.

So he'd followed the potion-maker toward the moathouse, where a particular weed grew in abundance in the marshes. So they'd discovered the dragon. So they were driven down the stairs in a panic. So they'd had to hide. So they'd spent two days peeking out the door. So here he is, here these people are; they seem decent enough, but more than that, it was clear they had power. They'd come into this dungeon like a wave of the commanding hand of Order, and butchered Mojo's prisoners in a 30-second orgy of violence and magic. If he really was somewhere else, he'd need powerful help. “So, hello, new friends!” he thought, giggling a little at his cynicism.

A search of the rest of the complex turned up some items of interest. Pho found the secret door through which the cultist had escaped; the rogue marked it to make it easy to find, and then spiked it closed to prevent any surprises. On a folded expanse of snowy-white cloth were some items the cleric had left in her haste, possibly products of the 'excavation' here mentioned in Master Dunrat's letters. Some of the items had a magical aura (a small black sphere, a heavy iron torch) while others did not (a black scepter decorated with violet gems, a smooth black metal tube). Unequipped with the proper divination magic, and exhausted from the effort of two rapid-fire brushes with mortality, the group bargained for watch order and fell into slumber.

GONZO TEMPLE: Dungeon-crawling at last

STARRING

Pho (Sarah's human rogue/fighter)

Zeppo (Shaun's gnome druid)

Kedrin (Kelly's human cleric of Pelor/fighter)

Vig (Jeff's half-orc monk)

WITH

Badger (Zeppo's panther animal companion/mount)

AND INTRODUCING

Mojo (Chris' human sorceror)

===========================================

With the dragon driven off, the group got down to the business of trying to find a way down. Zeppo noticed signs that foot and wagon traffic had entered the courtyard, and the papers left behind by the grotesque hook-riding, rape-ordering Master Dunrat indicated that a cult group was attempting to excavate something below.

The search didn't take terribly long. A skirmish with a pool of pseudopod-extending ooze was disgusting but uneventful; Vig splashed the thing about with a two-fisted assault, shuddered off the effect of touching it, and that was that. Pho found recently-used stairs going down into darkness, and crept down to listen for company.

There are times when it's handy to have a genius polyglot as your scout; this was one of those times. Pho not only heard the two gnoll guards sufficently to make out their numbers, but she also could understand their tongue – meaning she got more.

“There's two guards in the room at the bottom of the stairs,” she said simply upon her return to the group. “They're part of a larger group. They wonder when the end of their shift is, when they can go back down. They're trapped by the dragon. They're all living down here.”

Pho's terse summary sharpened the tension – the cult was here, right here, with some of their gnoll muscle. “Let's do this!” Zeppo declared, climbing on Badger's back. Everyone loosened weapons and a general move toward the stairs began. “I have a plan,” Kedrin hissed sotto voce. “Wait!

“Perhaps we can encourage these guards to investigate, and then slay them before they raise the alarm,” Kedrin went on once the general bloodlust subsided a bit. “We surely don't want to fight all of them at once?” Pho agreed instantly with the plan, and shouted kar-artan down the stairwell, telling the two gnolls to “Come see this!” in their native tongue.

The gnolls came, but not incautiously, foiling the gambit. The first gnoll reached the landing at the mid-point of the stairs, turned the corner, and had just enough time to register a look of comic canine surprise before meeting a volley of projectiles. The second gnoll, surprised but not unmanned by the attack, simply stopped, drew his weapon, lifted his muzzle, and let out a piercing, haunting howl.

Time slowed down, or everyone sped up; the two states are similar. Vig led the way, his massive shoulders just avoiding the walls as he leapt down the stairs two at a time. Torches! “Room has light. Will help my friends,” he thought. The monk met the howling beast with a simple uppercut, hoping to befuddle the dog-man, but to no avail. Past Vig and into the space poured the rest of the party – this was one gnoll with a bleak future.

The room into which the party sallied was low-ceilinged – the gnoll fought while ducking his head a bit – and deeply unsavory. Black-stained manacles and broken cells spoke of imprisonment and torture in the not-too-distant past; the cells receded off into darkness. Little of this registered as the group administered a particularly vicious form of last rites to the dog-man – Badger's raking attack and Pho's final-shot backstab are a horrible way to meet one's end – but the focus swung toward the cells quickly enough.

Everyone has heard that creatures – at least creatures with bowels – produce massive bowel movements when slain. Gnolls have bowels, so it's not entirely surprising that everyone assumed the ghast's stench was merely the second gnoll confirming hearsay. The smell crescendoed well beyond the range of gnoll-crap, combining a sulfurous biting aroma with a evil, rotten funk; imagine slimy, black banana peels, days old in the sun, covered in the last unscavenged bits of extravagantly rotten lamb, accompanied by a burning pile of hair and cat dung – this gives some idea.

Vig and Pho, alight with the joy of kicking gnoll ass, were cast abruptly into darkness and fell to wretching, although the massive monk evaded the ghast's attack easily. From beyond the ghast came more of its type, their rancid, blackened flesh stringy over shambling bones, half-fleshed hands extended, faces slack but registering a greedy glee. Kedrin assumed a stance of power, raised his gilded sun-symbol, and flashed, strobing the room with a burst of purified sunlight.

All traces of glee vanished from the ghouls. The expressions were amended into fervid expressions of horror, their mouths now unjointed, the darkness in their eyes turning desperately away from the man who glowed like the sun. They fled into the furthest corner of an adjoining room, away from both the light and Kedrin, leaving the ghast alone between the gnome and his snarling, slashing mount.

Follow now the fight back a bit in time; consider who heard the howl. Two rooms away, a human woman in ochre robes contemplated some of the finds from the dig below. Touching some of the items gave her a tingling thrill, imagining the shock of the unbelievers when the Dread One rises; perhaps her stepfather would get a visit from her when in her power … her pleasant daydream was broken by a warning-howl from one of the idiot doglings who served as guards.

“Get out there and help them,” she snapped at the two gnolls lounging in the room, guarding her by napping. Changing her mind, she put a hand on a door. “Wait, no – wait for these bonemen here,” she said, then snapped the door open and murmured a word of dark command to the five skeletons trapped in the room. Barely 10 seconds after the howl, the gnolls escorted the skeletons through the intervening room and, hearing combat, burst the door open to allow the lifeless vanguard to pour in.

Zeppo whirled about to face the bony onslaught, his fists already aflame from an earlier spell, and changed, stretching in every direction at once, growing taller, heavier, and hairier, his lower face pushing forward into a snout, his hands (still flaming) losing fingers in favor of inches-long talons. Kedrin, not content to be outshone, shouted “FOR PELOR!” and strobed the room again, once, twice, leaving everyone there with flashing after-images of the skeletons exploding into flinders, shattered utterly by the touch of the sun-god's power.

For the once-confident gnolls, the response of Zeppo and Kedrin was a knee-trembler. Still, they understood that failing the skinny, pale human woman behind them meant not just death; no, she would enslave their corpses, walk them around like she and they were packmates. Never. Bound to her beyond death, they staggered forward to their doom.

It wasn't long in coming. Flaming bear, whirling half-orc, darting human, slashing panther; the ghast fell, and the gnolls, and the gore made the floor slick. The skinny, pale priestess tried one last time to aid her cannon fodder – the massive orc-man shook off her attempt to arrest him in place – then slipped out the back door to warn her superiors about this new threat.

No sooner were the gnolls dispatched than another door swung open, and into the charnel-house stench stepped an oddly-dressed human. His headgear seemed a snarl of leather strapping interrupted by two circular discs; on his wrists and across his shoulders he was similarly wrapped in odd bits of leather. His cloak was sumptuous, though, looking warm without seeming heavy. “Hey, thanks for that,” he said. “Been waiting for my chance to get out for a couple of days now.”

“I should introduce myself. Mojo. Mister Mojo Risen. Is that dragon still up there?”