The Gaming Outpost

In order:

- Didn’t you basically abandon him in his sleep? He’s got food for a while (complete with dishes), but still. I think your reasoning was that he was safer without you. See item three.

- To be fair, she only almost punched you. Her diamond ring caught on your ear (see item three), splitting it as her fist narrowly avoided collision with your ripe, succulent head. Also, the ‘vision’ was purely auditory, comprising a conversation between the lady, the clergy who had been present at the attempted execution, and (briefly) another authoritative party. See item five.

- The lady has your blood on her ring (see item two), which has sinister implications. See item five.

- You tried at least two methods at least two times each. One resulted in utter failure, another was learned successfully but failed against the lady’s force of will.

- The lady (who isn’t a Lady; I think I might have been calling her Matron? Or she might have been addressed as Mistress? Not sure) referred to this higher personage as “my Lord,” which implies scarier, yes. I’ll believe it when I see it. The clergy addressed him as Lord, if at all; he might or might not be clergy himself. They spoke as if he was involved in the conversation remotely, perhaps by speakerphone or satellite feed or similar, but not present at their physical location. For example, there was talk of him ‘arriving,’ which would be odd if he were already in the room. See item 3: one item on the agenda was locating you (or dealing with you somehow otherwise) via your blood. His Lordship as good as said that the lady’s possession of your blood means he’s as good as got you already. It’s less certain whether they still have Murdoc’s tongue or if they even still care about him at this point.

- What do you recall of the description of the room?

1@1 Teleport Object In M12@3+ TF 10:00, pray in Bah to Bah Tor for the return of one object that has been marked in blood while kneeling with both hands on a diagram drawn on parchment in the same blood that the object is “tagged” with (although note that this circumvents the normal tagging method for teleportative spells), for objects in the control of another creature see page 263, +51 SM, W10

I don’t have the notes on your most recent teleport spell, sadly. I recall that it took you to an unspecified safe place, but the rest is hazy. You do so many spells . . .

Any details you can remember are appreciated. This seems like the sort of prayer you may use again. Within this world, even.

I’m cooking up your next game post, I just thought I’d air these skills while I was poking around in your sheet. Let me know if you want me to email you a copy of your current sheet.

Oh, and I fixed Maxx’s thread to be tagged properly, so we’ll be continuing in this thread (no deletions or restarts).

Ah, don’t worry about. The next time you want to use the teleport-to-safety spell, we’ll just invent it all over again and call it the spell you learned. Unless you never cast it again, which is possible.

The small, stone room you occupy is in serious disarray and looks as though it has been for some time. The single wooden door is askew in its stone frame, leaning from one hinge, and even the stone floor sports a great crack running nearly the length of the room; the ceiling has one to match. There are two wooden benches nearly as wide as the room, one toppled and the other merely slid into an awkward position. A wooden shelf bolted into one wall droops at a thirty-degree incline, its contents dumped to the floor in a jumble of glass, ceramics and sand. About the only element left undisturbed is the great hourglass – or perhaps dayglass – centered on the waist-high stone block that may once have served as an altar.

The room as a whole is small, perhaps the size of a particularly austere oratory. There no windows and no light sources (other than what you’ve conjured), and only one exit, previously mentioned, opposite the altar. The air is cool and dank.

Your doubts are justified, though I wonder what you would consider out of place among the shelf’s displaced contents.

The door opening is indeed narrow, but you manage to pivot it sufficiently on its hinge that you can slip through the opening without further incident.

Do we recall which light spell you had it use? If not, just guess for me.

I’ll make a more proper game post next time, but it occurs to me that dungeon-exploration style play works better in a forum format if I have expectations and parameters from you – think of it like setting the AI, so that I can make your choices for you and deliver content faster instead of you having to mash the X button and click through the action menu every time.

Dunno if that made sense, but I’m walking out the door, and if it didn’t and you scratch your head about it until I post next that’s no great loss.

The hallway you emerge into is high but relatively narrow. Two men could pass each other if the need arose, but they could not walk abreast comfortably. The ceiling comes to a point (shaped like the tip of the Taj Mahal) about a man’s height above your head. The hallway extends straight away to your left for about twenty feet and, to your right, gently curves back such that the near wall very soon blocks your view in that direction. To your left there are two doorways along the near wall, neither one containing a door nor showing evidence of a door’s remains. The doorways are spaced evenly, and your light extends far enough to show that the hallway opens up into a large space not far beyond the second doorway.

There are again no windows, nor light sources of any kind. The walls and floor are all of stone, but there are no blocks nor mortar; everything is of a solid piece, as though the rock was naturally this way.

The two doorways actually open onto the same room, each positioned toward one end; the room is of about the same depth as the one you arrived in and appears to have no other exits. The light from your head (your headlight?) shows four rectangular pits of white sand along the rear wall, each perhaps three feet wide and six feet long. There are a few items scattered about, but none of them seizes your interest.

The more open area is obviously a naturally formed cave, unshaped and unworked. The floor is uneven and generally sloped downward. The space is wider and much higher than it is deep; the near and far walls come together to form a narrow, lightless crevice overhead. The right hand wall is more or less flush with the right hand wall of the corridor you are exiting and is reasonably sheer, while the left boundary of the cave is merely where the near and far walls come together to form an acute corner (perhaps twenty-five or thirty feet away). Tiny specks and facets in the walls glitter and gleam in your light, one flashing and another going out as you shift your posture or take a step.

The low point of the cavern is the back right corner, which is filled by a pool of water. A level spot in the floor toward the left is occupied by a ring of stones with a blackened center.
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Graham rolls a 46 on his Bod 0@6 Sneak like a Thief, which (1@3 SAL + 1@10 BRA + no more than 20 for bias) succeeds. This will eliminate the intuition checks used to avoid ordinary surprise (a situation called “special surprise,” which might only sound like a desert to me because I’ve missed lunch) and create a relative success contest for anyone using skill specifically designed to counter special surprise via heightened awareness, alertness, or anticipation. In that context, it’s a strong success; any blind opponents are quite unlikely to notice the brightly luminescent figure stalking the hall.