OSR: Veinscrawl Session 21 & Final Notes

Last session, the party found some occultum, hired antling followers, tried experimental wizard drugs, and lost Tuck the summoner to a disastrous series of misfortunes.

The surviving PCs are:
-Cazael the spiderling fighter. Hardened survivor of many perils and far too much "wizard business".
-Swainson the garden wizard. Turned into a Lamassu (lion-bodied human-headed flying sphinx). Has a cat-coat with pockets and enchanted claws.
-Klaus the barbarian-sorcerer. Turned into a brownie; very unhappy in current form.
-Alice the deerling animist witch. A little bit mad. Strapped magic daggers to antlers.
-Emilio, the human speleomage. Enhanced spellcasting power thanks to liquid occultum injections.
-Jericho, the human elementalist wizard. Stole some occultum and got dire radiation poisoning. Currently losing his hair and bits of skin.

Assisted only by light spells and the glow of the ruins, the party continued their descent into the shattered city. 

They found a complicated, new, and fully active machine boring into the rocks. It seemed to be some sort of occultum-extractor, pulling and condensing raw magic from the ancient stones. They weren't the first to find the prize; Tiggy the hedgehogling thief and her three scabrous camp followers had laid claim to the huge machine.

The party negotiated. With the aid of some wizard skills and a scry spell, they managed to "safely" remove a canister full of occultum gas. After some debate and bickering, Alice decided to spray the gas directly into her sinus cavities, hoping it would condense into solid form somewhere near her brain and give her extra powers. Everyone else found cover.

Amazingly, Alice's plan worked. Her ego, formerly an unshakable force, grew to deific proportions, and her spellcasting abilities grew in equal measure.

Side Note: How many Saves vs Death can one character pass!?!

Reasoning that the occultum-extractor was a Dvergr machine, the party continued to descend. A few hours later, they spotted a spray of sparks from the side of a truly enormous vault. The castle-sized structure was made of strange glassy stone, impervious to the general ruin and destruction that had befallen the rest of the city. It stuck out from a vertical wall of rubble like a tree root from an eroded riverbank.

Suspended on the vertical face, on a gantry fused to the stone's surface with lumps of foam, six stumpy Dvergr miners operated an enormous and extremely complicated drill. Every few minutes, it sent out a spray of sparks and eroded another microscopic layer of stone. The hole into the vault was wide enough for a very small person to squeeze through, but not, the party reasoned, a full encumbered Dvergr.

"What's inside?" Tiggy asked. 
"Treasure, probably. Lots of it. Otherwise, why all this effort to get to it?" Alice replied.

That settled it. Thoughts of "rescuing" the mining team faded. They didn't need rescuing... except possibly from the avaricious PCs.

Wan Bao

The plan was simple. Alice's scying eyeball could see into the vault... but without a light source, it couldn't see past the first tiny room. It provided just enough information for Klaus and Swainson to use sorcery to warp inside.

Their appearance went unnoticed by the Dvergr on the vault's exterior. The flying cat and the brownie crept through the glass-stone chambers, examining strange rune-marks and magic control panels. They found enormous glass tanks containing preserved - or gestating - biomechanical war golems, creatures of sinew and magic clearly designed to terrify and devour. Or so Klaus conjectured; he really had no idea.

"If the Dvergr want to get inside, they probably know these things are here. If they know they're here, they can probably control them. And if they can control them, they'll kill us all." Swainson said, counting out her arguments on her clawed paws.
"True, Klaus said. "I wonder why the city-builders made this thing?"
"That last room had a surface-map in it. Maybe they wanted to invade the surface?"
"Maybe the Dvergr want to finish the job."

When the sorcerous effect expired, Swainson and Klaus returned to the top of the vault. The moving light source attracted some attention. While Cazael tried to distract the Dvergr by leaning off the vault and hollering diplomatic comments at them, the rest of the party prepared for a tactical ambush.

They seemed on the brink of success. Six unarmed dwarf-like things vs. a fully stocked, armed, and armoured party of experienced veinscrawlers.

Needless to say it all went to hell.

Derek Jones

1. Thoroughly worried, the Dvergr retracted the drill and started stuffing themselves into the vault. They had to break their shoulders to do it; not a pleasant sight.

2. Klaus tried to use sorcery to teleport all 6 Dvergr into the air above the poison gas fog in the centre of the ruins. The teleport would only be temporary, but exposure to the toxic green fumes (after a brief fall) would still probably kill them.

3. Unfortunately, the sorcery misfired. Instead of targeting the 6 Dvergr, it targeted 6 of the PCs: Cazael, Swainson, Alice, Emilio, Jericho, and Tiggy. Luckily, Klaus remained on top of the vault.

4. Klaus used sorcery to teleport Emilio, Jericho, and Tiggy, back to the top of the vault. Alice could transform into a flying bird-form. Swainson could already fly and had caught a very unhappy Cazael.

5. The strain of so much rapid sorcery caused Klaus to pass out, bleeding from his ears and twitching violently. When he fell unconcious, all sorcerous effects ended. The group was un-teleported once again. Everyone ended up where they started, deeply confused and very unhappy.

6. Alice, in bird-form, barreled into the vault at full speed, falling upon the Dvergr inside like a hawk on fieldmice.

7. Swainson, who had been carrying Cazael and flying at full speed when the teleport ended, flew off the vault and into the air. Cazael, still hanging from her claws, followed, howling the whole time.

8. The vault started to glow. Powerful magic circles appeared under the glassy surface. Apparently the Dvergr had activated something inside.

9. Jericho started climbing the ropes up and away from the vault, following the Antlings.

10. Emilio and Tiggy, on the surface of the vault, tried to heal Klaus.

11. The vault teleported upwards. Anyone touching the surface was smeared into a paste and spread into a thin sheet several miles tall. Emilio, Tiggy, and Klaus perished instantly.

12. Safe inside the vault, Alice continued to hunt and slaughter Dvergr.

13. Jericho, dangling from a rope and trying not to look down, waited until Cazael and Swainson landed before shimmying the rest of the way up to a semi-stable platform.

14. Swainson realized that she could use her teleport spell to follow the vault upwards. The spell had left a channel in reality, a sort of ozone-path a similar spell could easily follow, even if she didn't have a clear picture of the destination. While Dvergr-controlled war-golems were frightening, Alice-controlled war-golems would be unthinkable.

15. Cazael, thoroughly sick of life underground, agreed. Jericho was more-or-less coerced into joining the two survivors.
 
The teleport spell carried the PCs upwards. They landed in a swamp in the middle of the night, next to the half-sunk bulk of the vault. While Jericho shouted "WHAT IS THAT?" and pointed at the moon, Cazael stripped off his armour and climbed through the drill-hole.

Inside, Alice had cornered the last two Dvergr inside a golem vat-room. Cazael assisted in dispatching them before they could activate a golem. Just to be safe, Alice decided to cast doom on the golem.

She botched the spell and it targeted her instead. The mighty wizard, full of occultum and ambition, keeled over from her own spell.

Cazael shrugged, kicked the corpse, and dragged it out of the vault. Jericho used a full-power control earth spell to bury the giant stone structure in the water and slime of the swamp, hopefully concealing its dangerous cargo from ambitious warlords and wizards.

Yuri Hill

And so Cazael and Swainson returned to the surface. With sacks full of gold and bundles of magic items they could easily afford to retire. They wished Jericho well and set off for the hills, the giant winged cat padding along next to the dirt-encrusted fighter. No record exists of their fate.

Jericho spent the next few hours pointing at things and screaming. Trees, stars, toads; anything new and surface-related got a thorough examination. When the sun finally rose he pulled his hat over his eyes and sat in abject terror. A small group of curious visitors from a local barony found him sitting next to Alice's body.

But that's a story for another time.

Veinscrawl Notes

As a framework to use Veins of the Earth, the Veinscrawl worked fairly well.  The yellow line above is the approximate route the PCs took; ~29 hexes over 21 sessions. There's still plenty of material to use. The PCs didn't really get to see large sections of the map and entire factions. The also avoided cities and large settlements.

Goals
Finding a consistent group goal beyond "get loot" was a problem. The party happily followed anything that vaguely resembled a quest until they forgot the original goal. The players weren't intersted in domain-level play or carving out an empire.

Food and Light
Food was never a major issue. The PCs just ate whatever they killed, no matter how weird. Light was a constant concern. They used lanterns, fungi-branches, magic items, and conjured fire.

Abridgement
These session reports are very condensed and hastily edited. They're the highlights only; details, descriptions, and rulings are often left out. Overall, I'd say the game had a darker tone than the writeups, though there were still sections of pure farce and ambitious over-extension. As usual, the PCs were their own worst enemies (followed closely by gravity and 10' of water).

Whole subplots got cut (like Jericho's fire elemental familiar, Cazael's badly articulated plan to take Death hostage using a god-slaying spear, the dEr0, etc.).

Missing a Session
The oppressive darkness of the Veins let players drop in and out easily. The Missing a Session table saw a lot of use.

Encounters
The mix of Veins-creatures, creatures from the AD&D MM, and invented monsters kept things very interesting and volatile. The players never quite knew what to expect. The use of Omens (sounds, smells, or signs before the encounter) helped set the scene.

What Got The Most Use
-Veinscrawl encounter tables.
-Veins of the Earth bestiary and climbing rules.
-VotE treasure tables, cave shape tables, and spell list.
-Veinscrawl hex descriptions.

Things I'd Create For Next Time
-A player-facing price list with no prices and a GM-facing price list with prices. It just helps prompt good item-based problem solving and avoids the GM listing off every mundane item a market. Even a list of 20 common items would be good.
-A mundane "I Search the Body" table to complement the one in Veins of the Earth.
-I used the medieval-based GLOG hack throughout. In retrospect, a more carefully curated section of classes, races, etc. would have been useful, but I never got around to it.

OSR: Veinscrawl Session 18, 19, & 20

Last session the party fled the fungid valley, fought some monks, lost Bill to a botched roiling polymorph attack, and fled into the Ruins.

The surviving party members are:
-Cazael the spiderling fighter. Hardened survivor of many perils and far too much "wizard business".
-Swainson the garden wizard. Turned into a Lamassu (lion-bodied human-headed flying sphinx). Has a cat-coat with pockets and enchanted claws.
-Tuck the flealing summoner. A little bit creepy.
-Klaus the barbarian-sorcerer. Turned into a brownie; very unhappy in current form.
-Alice the animist witch. A little bit mad.

After stumbling through the catacombs for several hours, fleeing from anything that glowed or looked threatening, the party eventually found a fissure in the wall that didn't seem to be deliberately constructed. They crept through and found themselves on a balcony overlooking an underground city.

It took them a few minutes to adjust to sights more than a lantern's light in front of their eyes. The city was lit by a green chemical glow from a fissure along its length. Some ancient catastrophe had tilted entire districts, shattered roads and bridges, and shivered monuments into fragments. A few very distant lights moved occasionally. Torches, ghosts, or something far stranger? The air shimmered with chemical fumes.

After making camp and trying to adjust to the newly expanded vista, the party decided to explore the ruins. "After all," Swainson said, "that fungal ambassodile said we could track down some missing dwarf miners here. If we do, apparently he'll give us a map to the surface."
"Do you think he's still alive? We did kind of explode that village," Klaus said despondently.

With Swainson flying ahead to act as a scout and rope anchor, the party began moving through the abandoned cityscape. They weren't the only ones trying to find valuable treasure in the decaying and chem-blasted hulls of ancient buildings. Emilio, a human speleomage and Jericho, a human elementalist wizard, had mounted an expedition of their own. Trained underground by separate (competing) cabals of wizards and sent off to find valuable items, the two mages didn't trust each other... but knew their separate odds of survival were poor.

Swainson, a flying sphinx-thing, made an unlikely diplomat, but when she blundered into Emelio and Jericho she did her best to ease tensions before the rest of the group arrived. Having just lost one wizard, Cazael wasn't pleased to see two more, but accepted that they'd probably be less trouble than the late and lamented Bill. A vague treasure-sharing agreement was worked out, and the newly expanded party continued their quest for valuables.

In their wanderings, they found:

• ghosts (sprinted away from).
• mysterious enchantments (ignored).
• some friendly kobolds hiding in a toppled statue (lightly bribed.
• an iron golem guarding a gold mask (smashed and looted).
• pools of toxic flesh-devouring liquid (tempted to weaponized but ignored).
• malfunctioning repair-golems and seemingly insane constructs (interrogated then ignored).

Until finally, after several days, they traced some segmented metal conduits to their source. Some sort of lightning-fueled engine had burst from the ground. A skull-shaped metal totem rested on top. Anyone who approached it felt warm and started to taste metal. The device's components were inscrutable, but Jericho spotted a large and tempting occultum sphere embedded in one side.

"I'm going in!" Jericho announced, as the party watched from a safe distance. Despite being blasted by lightning and burned by strange energies, he pried out the occultum and fled back to the group.

He spent the next few hours vomiting and staggering. All his hair fell out. "Wizard business," Cazael declared, and refused to stand near him. Still, the egg-sized lump of occultum was a magical treasure beyond compare.

Continuing their exploration, the party found some other raiders in the ruins. A group of six antlings had fortified a tower. They were willing to ally with the PCs provided the PCs were traveling deeper into the ruins. They had no food to offer, but gave some hints towards local treasure.

Following the hints, the party found a buried bunker, disabled a lightning trap, fought some gas-mask-clad ghouls, and looted some gold and relics. The main treasure was a 2'x4' cabinet door that opened into an extradimensional space; a "door of holding", in a sense. Items placed inside it didn't increase the weight of the door and frame. Jericho was asked to carry the door; it provided a convenient shield between the unhealthy wizard and his allies.
Emelio, tempted by the occultum floating around the group, decided to try a dangerous technique for enhancing raw spellcasting power. With Jericho's help, the speleomage melted an occultum coin over a magic flame and injected the semi-real mixture directly into their skull. While the molten occultum damaged a few vital brain regions, it also granted Emelio extra power. The other wizards decided not to try it... yet.

After another day of rest, the party began their descent into the lower regions of the collapsed city. They fought off an ambush by some sort of hook-skinned doppleganger-fishing-line-thing, narrowly avoided some very dangerous terrain, and got moderately lost.

While trying to get their bearings, the group spotted a mostly intact room suspended inside a ruined horizontal building. Reaching the precariously balanced room was a challenge. Klaus, the smallest party member, agreed to be lowered on a rope. One locked cabinet was both intact and promising; Klaus tried to open it and narrowly dodged a dart trap. Annoyed, he stuck his hand inside, felt a velvet bag, and was astonished when the cabinet door slammed shut, neatly severing his hand at the wrist. The other PCs hauled him up and bandaged his wound.

Tuck volunteered for a second attempt. He decided to attach his summoned rope, Postidon-Pru, to the building's spar and to the cabinet drawer. The plan was to command the rope to retract, pulling the door free without risk of further injury. The initial stage worked, but the force and exertion started a chain reaction. The building began to collapse. The drawer, swinging like a pendulm on the end of the summoned rope, bashed into the outside of the hanging room. Tuck grabbed for the velvet bag. He was still attached to the building's roof with a rope and harness; escape was feasible.

Unfortunately, Klaus decided to help. The sorcerer created an iron box around Tuck to "protect him" from the collapsing structure. The box neatly severed Tuck's rope and trapped him in a ready-made coffin. As the box began to fall, Klaus realized his mistake and used sorcery to add pillows to the box's interior.

It didn't help. The summoner plummeted off the building, smashed through several layers of ruin, and collided with an iron plate far below. A few seconds later the sorcerous coffin vanished, revealing Tuck's mashed remains. Swainson flew down to loot the corpse. The velvet bag, the source of all the trouble, contained a rich haul of occultum and diamonds.

Tuck's death had also deprived the party of their only perpetual light source. The antlings had a lantern and several PCs still carried oil, but if the lantern failed or their hirelings decided to leave, the party could only rely on magic and temporary light spells.

Would the party ever find those missing miners? What riches lie at the bottom of the Ruins? Would any other wizards inject occultum directly into their brains?

Find out next time.

OSR: Veinscrawl Session 13, 14, 15, 16, & 17

Time to catch up. Last writeup was ages ago!

To recap, last session the party killed a Castilian Caddis Larvae, looted enormous sacks of gold and braces of magic weapons, and fled the newly radioactive underground lake and probable warzone.

Note: In the GLOG hack I'm using coins don't take up inventory slots unless you have over 1,000 of them. The PCs lumbered away from the cave with up to ten inventory slots full of coins weighing down their characters, having shed all non-essential items to haul more swords and coins.

The surviving party members are:
-Cazael the spiderling fighter. Fears magic but likes magic swords.
-Bill the wormling orthodox wizard. Has antlers, telekinesis, permanent wizard vision, inability to sleep, magic not-dying amulet, etc. A ticking time bomb.
-Swainson the garden wizard. Formerly a hawkling, then a dryad, then a whole succession of creatures in rapid succession. Currently a Lamassu (lion-bodied human-headed flying sphinx thing).
-Tuck the flealing summoner. Wants everyone to be his friend.
-Klaus the barbarian-sorcerer. Believes things into or out of existence or just hits them a lot. 
-Alice the animist witch. Formerly apprentice to a goat. It's complicated.

Most of this writeup will make very little sense even if you've been following the story so far. Don't worry about it!

We Are The Dwarves concept art.

The party immediately got lost.

They found a tidal cave system. Water rose and fell hourly. The party evaded some cave barnacles but ran straight into a knot of dead antling explorers (Panic Attack Jacks from Veins of the Earth). The Rapture attacked the Fighter, who tried to fight it off as best he could. Tuck the Summoner, perhaps unwisely, used his silver dream-key to enter the Fighter's addled mind.

Unfortunately, Cazael was fighting incarnations of his previous regrets and failures at the monastery... on the surface. Since Tuck had never seen the surface, the sight of clouds, trees, and a horizon drove him into screaming insensibility.

Soon, both Tuck and Cazael were fully controlled by the Rapture. While Cazael tossed his gold-encumbered allies into a 10' deep pool of water, Tuck summoned Pentornax, Traitor's Friend. Fortunately, none of the rest of the party qualified as Tuck's friends as they'd all publicly rejected his "really creepy" declarations of eternal friendship at one point or another, so Pentornax silently failed to stab anyone.

With some combined effort and desperate swimming, Bill, Klaus, Swainson (the very unhappy giant wet cat), and Alice managed to overpower their two addled friends and reverse the situation. Now Tuck and Cazael were in the water; the rest of the party, damaged and tired, clung to the few feet of rock just above the water's surface. The shock snapped Tuck and Cazael out of their murderous trance. Tuck climbed out with the aid of some summoned rope. Cazael sighed, pulled out the potion of water breathing he'd safely carried for months, and waited for the tide to receded.

Note: A 10' deep pool of water, some slimy rocks, panic, and unlimited greed are an excellent OSR trap.

Some time later, the party recruited Emilio, a human speleomage fleeing a life of petty wars to find fortune elsewhere in the Veins. Cazael sighed at the arrival of yet another wizard.

After getting lost again, finding yet another a village of intelligent myconids, an anglerfish mimic-cave, a pack of helpful but theft-prone kobolds, and a few other assorted monsters and terrors, the party finally returned to the myconid village on the shores of a caustic lake.

The village had become a sort of improvised arms market. Various factions in the Veins - dragon-bonded kobolds, proud and terrifying Drow, sly Dvergr, and dozens of petty human and inhuman kingdoms - had sent scouts or small armies into the Fungid Valley to drag out the fabled weapons of the Castilian Caddis Fly.

The party converted as much gold into occultum as the local economy could support, bought some magic weapons and a few potions, collected a small reward from their Fungal Ambassodile contact (war having improved his business immensely), and decided to rest in the village's neutral zone for the night.

Bill the Wizard had unwisely taken a potion of "never sleeping again". While this let him watch the party while they rested, he'd found that by 72 hours awake he'd become too jittery to function properly. Luckily, Bill knew the sleep spell and could knock himself out at will. After he'd done so, Tuck decided to "help" his friend.

Once again, Tuck pulled out his silver dream-key. The key was intended to let Tuck and his cultist friends physically climb into the brains of sleeping people, eat food, and get out. Normally, they'd use it on specially drugged, docile, and hungry people.

Klaus and Cazael decided to accompany Tuck on his self-appointed mission to "help fix Bill's brain". They schlooped into the wizard's fevered dreams... only to discover thousands of near-identical goblins had invaded his memories! During the last expedition into Bill's brain, a few goblins had been accidentally left behind. Unfettered by physics they'd multiplied - or fragmented, or fractalized - into a chaotic swarm. The goblins were busy sawing through crystal memory trees, building flying cloud-fortresses, taking turns riding the train of thought off the rails, etc, etc, etc.

Clearly, this couldn't go on. After some debate, Klaus decided to use his sorcerous powers to create a dream-copy of the "Beige Dragon Gomstead", the (fictitious) dragon the goblins had invented and sworn to follow. Obligingly, the Beige Dragon plopped into existence, delighting the hordes of chittering goblins. With some more sorcerous nudging, the dragon picked up a goblin. Another goblin grabbed the first one's feet, then another, then another, until an impossibly long chain of excited goblins was whipping through the dream-air of Bill's mind.

The dragon initially tried to exit by burning a hole in the top of Bill's skull, but Tuck managed to redirect it using the silver dream-key. With a terrific roar, the dragon popped out of Bill's ear, followed by a chain of several hundred screaming goblins. Goblins who had mutated to produce black smoke whenever they "thought too hard" (like now) and pink foam whenever they died (which they soon began to do as gravity took hold). 

Gomstead flapped through the cave, spreading goblins, fiery death, architectural ruin, and utter bafflement in all directions. When Tuck, Cazael, and Klaus finally emerged from Bill's ear, they simply grabbed the wizard and ran into the darkness. The disastrous mind-delve had permanently reduced Bill's intelligence. No one was sure of the goblins or Gomstead were "real" and nobody wanted to find out.

Florent Desailly

The party decided to leave the Fungid Valley as rapidly as possible. Without leads, contacts, or a safe haven, they decided to follow the only map they had. The Fungal Ambassodile had suggested they track down a missing Dvergr mining party in a mysterious region called "The Ruins".

After losing track of Emilio, finding a stranded whale, banishing its nightmares with Swainson's (Lamassu-derived) Holy Word, and then tipping it down a very deep hole to, "Somewhere nice? Hopefully.", the party found a large cave full of shrieking purple worm larvae.

They struggled to get through. The larvae weren't harmful individually, but their maddening whine and blood-seeking intent soon drove the party to distraction and disorder. Their only lantern was smashed in the chaos. After using sorcery to create a loud noise to cancel out the worms (and accidentally deafening the party), Klaus created a light source to assist their panicked flight (accidentally blinding the party but not the sightless worms). A vampyric healing amulet Alice picked up back in the village sucked some flesh from Tuck. Swainson tried to fly over the worms and concussed herself on a stalactite. Klaus tested out his new magic sword and ran into a wall, then fell into a pit of worms.

In short, it was a disaster. Klaus was the worst off. When the party dragged him out of the worm pit he was clearly bleeding to death. Bill decided to use his dagger of roiling polymorph to save his friend. Klaus the human barbarian became Klaus the Brownie.

He was not at all pleased, and not just because the transformation had destroyed all his non-magical items and treasures. He could barely lift a full-size sword now, let alone use it. Still, he'd survived, and the party kept moving.

Eventually, they found a settlement marked on their map. Inside the green stone walls, a group of peculiar blind monks glorified in their prediction of the apocalypse. Apparently their entire civilization had been swallowed by fire and caustic death; just as predicted, of course. The rest of the world wouldn't be far behind. The monks used some sort of time lock to skip forward in time, waiting for the inevitable end of the world. They sold the PCs some food and promised safe passage into the Ruins via "the Catacombs".

Instead, the monks lead the PCs into a pit trap and shut the door. The trap slowly filled with carbon monoxide. Evidently the monks still needed to eat and couldn't pass up a potentially enormous meal. Klaus used his sorcery powers to seal the gas-holes. The party pretended to pass out, but realized after a few minutes that the monks could probably hear them breathing. Irritated, Cazael teleported through the door on Swainson's back and slaughtered two very surprised monks. The remaining monks managed to time lock themselves before the enraged fighter could sink his sword into their necks.

After rescuing the party and looting whatever small items they could find, the party tossed all time lock monks they could find into their own gas trap and left through the actual entrance to the Catacombs.

Chase Toole

Things went awry almost immediately. The party decided to raid the tomb of some ancient king to steal the perpetual light source (a magic florescent glass ring 2' wide) and any other treasures inside. Lifting the glass ring woke up four bound wights, who descended on the mostly unprepared group with terrible swiftness. Alice lost two levels almost immediately. Klaus tried to use sorcery to turn the ghostly figures into paper, cotton wool, or other less dangerous substances, but only succeeded in inconveniencing two of the ghosts. While Cazael furiously dueled one remaining spirit, Bill was engaged in the fight of his life with another. In desperation, Bill stabbed the ghost with the dagger of roiling polymorph.

The ghost turned into a giant tick, passed its save against confusion, and bit Bill on the leg, giving him fatal Lyme disease (4 days to live!).

Note: Apparently giant ticks are really deadly in the ol' AD&D Monster Manual. Who knew?

The next round, the wight-giant tick failed its save and polymorphed into a Marid, a powerful djinn. The Marid promptly wished Bill out of existence. And so ends the story of Bill.

Here's Bill's character sheet. RIP Bill. You were 100% wizard.

Perpetual light source in hand, the party fled into the Catacombs. Would they escape the angry and very powerful Djinn chasing them?  Would they ever find the Ruins? And if they did, would they find the whole thing worthwhile?

OSR: Veinscrawl Session 11 & 12

Last session, the party fought a whale and a vampire, lost the goblins, and went slightly mad.

The party consists of: Cazael the spiderling fighter. Fears magic, prefers a good sword and a simple plan.
Bill the wormling Orthodox Wizard. Has antlers, telekinesis, permanent wizard vision, inability to sleep, magic not-dying amulet, etc. Generally considered a liability.
Swainson the Garden Wizard. Formerly a hawkling, currently a dryad.
Christen Bell the weasel-ling Bell Exorcist. Starting to think this whole underground thing was a bad idea.
Tuck the Flealing Summoner. Suspicious but loyal.

The map has grown so complex that the map-making player has split it into 2 files. Here's the original map (up to Session 8).

 And here's session 9, 10, 11, and 12.

Starting with "The Ambassagater"...

1. The party, recovering from their hallucinations, found themselves on the edge of a great underground chemical lake. They negotiated passage across on slate skiff-boats piloted by myconids.

2. At a fungal village / trading port, the PCs finally encountered something like a civilization. Protected by the myconids, traders from many underground states could meet in relative safety in the centre of the fungid valley. The village contained the semi-permanent embassy of a fungal ambassodile, a two-minded creature full of secrets and schemes. It also contained a Drow silk-merchant.

3. Bill negotiated with the mysterious elf to learn new spells. Tuck, offended by the Drow's aloof and insulting nature, hurled insults of his own. The Drow made most of Tuck's organs fall out. Tuck, annoyed by this, gathered up his still-functional innards and asked the Drow to "fix it". The Drow did. Tuck now loved the Drow. He literally couldn't think badly of them.

4. Meanwhile, Cazael and the rest of the party met with the fungal ambassodile. The strangely charming creature asked them, as independent operatives, to go and sort out a minor problem with a giant magical creature in a lake. If they could kill the creature, they'd earn vast rewards, including a map to the surface.

5. The party also recruited a young woman, Alice, and a mysterious goat, Tom.

6. Their route to the lake passed through the Slime Vortex, a funnel-shaped cave full of spinning slimes. Water flowing into the channel was filtered by the rotating mass of slimes. It was a miracle of nature and a massive obstacle to travel. It was also an excellent source of gold; all the inedible metals sunk to the bottom of the funnel.

7. The gold was far too tempting for Tom the Goat and Bill the Wormling. Together, they descended into the funnel, dodging slimes the whole way. Unfortunately for them, the pool at the bottom of the cave wasn't water at all, but another transparent slime. They were both badly bludgeoned and partially digested.

8. Klaus used his sorcerous powers to part the slimes, altering the funnel's geometry temporarily and allowing for the rescue of Bill, the goat, and a small amount of gold.

9. Tom the goat, who was "really weird", everyone agreed, was in a semi-permanent coma. Alice, his keeper and apprentice witch, decided to take matters into her own hands.

10. After several more adventures, the party finally found the gigantic underground lake at the heart of the fungid valley. They decided to lure the "magic beast" in the lake to shore using a magic battery - stolen from a dEr0 earthquake machine - as bait. 

11. The plan worked, and a horrible insect, with a shell made entirely of magic weapons, lurched from the lake to savage the group. The party's plan hadn't extended beyond luring the beast closer. They immediately panicked.

12. Christen Bell and Swainson were crushed by the beast's magic shell. Mangled beyond recognition, they were left to die on the rocky shore as Cazael and Bill tried to fight the creature. Alice turned into a strange rubbery bird and flew away, shouting "Fuck this, I'm out!". She stopped just long enough to drop the magic battery onto the back of the giant beast.

13. Cazael set the magic battery on fire and, briefly, drove the caddis-fly-thing into the lake. Bill, meanwhile, attempted a radical healing procedure for his two "mostly dead" friends. Sure, Swainson and Christen Bell were dead in the medical sense, but possibly not in the wizardly sense. He stabbed them both with his dagger of roiling polymorph.

14. Christen Bell turned into an octopus and stayed there. Unable to live out of the water, she sadly lurched into the lake.

15. Swainson, on the other hand, polymorphed into a ravenous shadow, then a cave giant. Still disoriented by lurching from splintery death into gigantic life, she spotted the caddis-fly monster charging towards shore. She struck the creature with a mighty blow, tore it apart, and scattered magical implements and gold all over the shore.

16. The dagger was, unfortunately, roiling polymorph. Swainson polymorphed from a giant to a panther, a rhino, a mummy, a brass dragon, a cockatrice, a giant (again!), a squid, a gorilla, and finally, after over an hour of screaming and flopping from form to form, stabilized as a lamassu. While not ideal, a lamassu was hardly the worst thing to be. At least Swainson could speak and move and even cast spells; her new cow-sphinx-lion form would do.

17. With her mind fading fast, octopus-Christen Bell decided to end her life by magic sword. She chopped herself into neat cubes and faded away.

18. Encumbered with thousands of gold pieces and dozens of magic swords, the surviving members of the party lurched away from the magically contaminated lake, leaving entire drifts of swords and gold behind.

Would their hasty actions result in underground warfare? What was the ambassodile's plan? Could they use Swainson's new lamassu powers to escape to the surface or was her mind too badly scrambled by her many transformations?

Find out next time.

OSR: Veinscrawl Session 9 & 10

Last session, the party discovered they were being fought a mind flayer, mutated, duplicated, and meddled with forces they really shouldn't have meddled with.

The party consists of:
Cazael the spiderling fighter. The leader of the group by default.
Bill the wormling Orthodox Wizard. Has antlers, telekinesis, permanent wizard vision, inability to sleep, magic not-dying amulet, etc. Generally considered a liability.
Swainson the Garden Wizard. Formerly a hawkling, currently a dryad.
Christen Bell the weasel-ling Bell Exorcist. Keeps vanishing and returning, possibly on secret errands.
Many Goblins. A nebulous swarm.
Tuck the Flealing Summoner. Despite being untrustworthy, has proved both reliable and sensible. Everyone is surprised.

The map has grown so complex that the map-making player has split it into 2 files. Here's the original map (up to Session 8)

And here's the map for sessions 9 and 10.

I'd really recommend reading the map before reading the writeup below.

1. The party met a village of red-and-black fungus people. They wanted the party to assist in their war against another village of fungus people across the river. The party accepted, traded some items for light and food, and rested in a coal-cave for a few hours. Bill, no longer requiring sleep, kept watch.

2. Klaus the barbarian, who had vanished at some point previously, finally turned up. He'd been taken by "nightmare elf slavers" but escaped their prison-pens through copious violence. The party, slightly embarrassed, mumbled something about a rescue plan and welcomed their friend back into the fold.

3. After considerable debate, the party decided to "deal with Yorminthal the Giant" before exploring the rest of the fungid valley. Using Swainson's locate animal spell to locate the nearest cave giant, the party tried to track the hideous cartilaginous creature as it was tracking them.

4. While creeping back along the river-side path, Tuck located and taunted the slinking cave giant. He was nearly captured for his troubles, but retreated safely using his summoned rope. Yorminthal waded through the river towards the party,  filling his guts with water before belching a small tidal wave towards the party.

5. Bill posed dramatically (wide stance, finger gun pointed, head tilted) and let off a fireball. The blast evaporated most of the water, but it still carried Bill off the path's edge and into the river.

6. Klaus grabbed the falling wizard by the ankle (still posing) and flipped him back onto the path (still posing). Bill fired off prismatic ray, severely melting the howling cave giant. Cazael finished it off with several arrows to the brain.

7. Delighted, if a little damp, the party looted the corpse. Yorminthal was wearing a giant-sized gold torc encrusted with fist-sized diamonds. It was incredibly heavy. Klaus, delighted, stripped off his armour and decided to wear the torc as a sort of cloak or bandolier.

8. The party returned to the fungus village. They traded the giant's body parts for gold and maps and helped the fungus-people fish more giant chunks from the river.

9. With a map to the "enemy" fungus village, the party set off through the coral reef coal-caves. After a narrow squeeze, they emerged into a white fungus-tuft bowl. Inside, moving through the dense spores as if they were water, was a giant fungus... whale... thing. It moved on dozens of stolen legs. Its milky hide was pierced by dozens of spears, rusted swords, and bone daggers.

10. Cazael, slightly terrified, shouted "Whales don't have legs!". Klaus the Barbarian, thoroughly convinced, used his (hitherto secret) sorcerous powers to make the fungus whale's legs vanish.

11. Snapping and squelching, though with significantly reduced mobility, the whale attacked the party. Clouds of fungal spores blinded several party members, but Swainson, assisted by the goblins, managed to pour an entire bottle of giant-killing poison down the whale's throat before it reached their tunnel. It dissolved into stinking slime. A few moments later, the disappeared legs popped back into reality, kicking wildly in the puddle of dissolving whale.

12. Sorting through the rubble, the party found several lumps of fused gold coins, a dozen gems, and a giant magic spear. The wizards couldn't conclusively identify the spear's enchantment, but they were certain it was primordial, incredibly powerful, nearly impossible to break, and designed to kill one particular kind of being. "Angels, maybe," Bill speculated.

13. Cazael was very excited by the spear. His knight and friend, Tschana, had vanished when the Angel of Death showed up during an adventuring disaster several months ago. With an angel-killing spear, his chances of rescuing his friend from the land of unlife.

14. While crawling through a very narrow passage, the party collided with a band of fungus-dwelling humanoids. Rather than the mushroom folk they'd seen earlier, these people seemed to be infected with and adapted to their fungal surroundings. After some negotiations, they invited the party back to their village.

15. While resting, the party was ambushed, knocked out with fungus bombs, and tied up. They awoke in a grand arena. There, Wonderwood Strongbow, one of their former companions, accused them of various crimes. Wonderwood looked worse for wear; she'd become a vampire, but her fungus-zombie-potion flasks had somehow fused to her body. A swarm of necrotic fungus pygmies, with her scowling face, attended her every move.

16. The party protested their innocence, especially Tuck and the Goblins who had never seen Wonderwood before in their lives. The vampire elf promised to kill them last.

17. While Cazael furiously tried to get out of his restraints, Swainson cast light with (as her player gleefully pointed out) "all the properties of natural sunlight." Hissing and screaming, the vampire elf retreated at speed, leaving her fungus-goons to defend her path of retreat.

18. As Many Goblins untied the rest of the party, Cazael and Swainson pursued. Cazael dispatched three of the vampire's guards with his ice sword. Christen knocked out the fourth with her magic bells.

19. The hallway the vampire fled down was trapped. It tipped like a see-saw in the middle, depositing several PCs one level below the others. Those below fought a hideous spider-construct, a wood and web golem that launched poison darts and grappling tarantulas. Those above fought the vampire and her fungus minions.

20. Bill was level drained for 2 hard-won levels, making him a diminished and dismayed wizard. Christen, surrounded by fungus creatures, called on the dEr0 Conspiracy to aid her. It turns out that she hadn't entered the tunnel at all; she was still outside, and a dummy made of straw and glue had taken her place in the combat. Bill, now further dismayed, started screaming.

21. By resetting the trap tunnel, Swainson was able to retreat and shove her light-bearing arm towards the vampire. One round of direct sunlight later and the vampire evaporated, leaving a greasy residue of ash behind. Her fungus minions fled into the darkness.

22. Rather than retreat, the party pressed on. They came to a cave full of powerfully hallucinogenic spores. The swarm of goblins were thoroughly confused and saw a vision of the Beige Dragon Gomstead, their entirely fictitious protector. Delighted, they swarmed across a chasm (along a path the rest of the party could not easily follow) to frolic with their hallucinated friend.

23. Klaus used his sorcerous powers to create a "real" Beige Dragon Gomstead to try and lure the goblins back. The goblins, clambering all over their friend, asked the dragon to fly them to the surface. The dragon complied, flying upwards through a series of narrow chimneys and shafts.

24. 5 rounds later the Beige Dragon vanished. The goblins screamed briefly before falling. The party was pelted with their mangled corpses as they plummeted.

Now goblin-less, but still hallucinating intermittently, the party fled the cave to search for a place of safety. What would they find in the next cave? Have they become permanently lost? Will anyone figure out Klaus is a sorcerer before he explodes from his own hubris?

Find out next time.

OSR: Veinscrawl Session 7 & 8

Last session, the party discovered they were being hunted by a cave giant, several people encountered the dEr0 Conspiracy, and almost everyone went to a lovely dinner party with a Ghoul Baron.

The party consists of:
Cazael the spiderling fighter. The leader of the group by default.
Bill the wormling Orthodox Wizard. Has antlers, telekinesis, permanent wizard vision, etc. Is slowly growing even stranger.
Swainson the Garden Wizard. Formerly a hawkling, currently a dryad. Sensible wizard.
Christen Bell the weasel-ling Bell Exorcist. Keeps vanishing and returning, possibly on secret errands. Many Goblins. Full of teeth, bad plans, and poor impulse control.
Tuck the Flealing Summoner. Wants everyone to be his friend.

Just a reminder; these maps are player-created. Some information may be missing, mangled, or illustrated oddly.

The full map is getting difficult to read. Here's a zoomed-in section of just sessions 7 and 8.

Starting in the bottom right.

1. The party left Ghoul Baron Sulyvhan's fortress. They decided to head to the Fungid Valley, reasoning that fungus = cheap food and cheap food = easy money.

2. While traveling, the party finds a long shallow lake. A temple lit by green flames can be seen on the other side. Cazael falls in a pit while traversing the lake and nearly drowns. He is saved by Tuck the Summoner and his summoned rope.

3. The party cautiously enters the Temple of Arithane. An invisible oracle, dwelling in sulphrous fog, tells them it will trade spines for answers. The oracle can tell them the location of any person or object. It wants diseased, deformed, or unusual spines.

4. After not looting anything in the temple, the party follows the water down. After hiding from some sort of cave bear (who may or may not have been a dEr0 construct), the party found a path next to the river. On the side of a river, they encounter a traveling group of masked medicine sellers. Clad in heavy robes and carrying many strange bundles and flasks, the medicine sellers greet the party on friendly terms.

Swainson: "Potion seller, I am in need of your strongest poisons."
Medicine Seller: "You don't know what you ask, traveler. My strongest potions will kill a dragon let alone... tree... person.."
Swainson: "Perfect. I said poisons. Got anything that can kill a cave giant?"
Medicine Seller: "We may. Our strongest poison could kill a cave giant or a lesser being... and their entire family."
Swainson: "Excellent. One giant-killing poison please and thank you!"

After swaddling the flask of giant-killer potion (a waterproof clay jar marked with four skulls), Swainson left the medicine sellers alone. Bill, however, was negotiating his own deal.

Bill: "I'm tired of sleeping. Terrible things happen whenever I fall asleep. Do you have anything that will let me stay awake forever?"
Medicine Seller: "We do, but I must warn you..."
Bill: "Done. Yoink!"

And so, Bill the Wizard can no longer fall asleep on his own.

5. The Many Goblins were temporarily unsupervised. They explained to the medicine sellers that they wanted a potion to, "make more pig", pointing at their sonic piglet pet. The medicine sellers took most of the gold the goblins had and handed over a glowing green flask of something volatile and rattling. They then ran away with as much dignity as they could muster.

The next few things happened in quick succession. It's important to note that the party was on a narrow downward-sloping path next to a rushing river.

6. The goblins fed the duplication potion to the sonic pig. The sonic pig split into 2 sonic pigs. The goblins squealed with delight.

7. The rest of the party realized that the goblins were up to something and moved closer to investigate.

8. The pigs split again into 4 sonic pigs. They also started glowing slightly. The goblins cheered again.

9. The pigs split again into 8 sonic pigs and began attacking the goblins in mindless bloodlust. The characteristic dubstep wub wub wub of the sonic pigs, the screams of the goblins, and the consternation of the party filled the air.

10. Swainson decides that things are getting out of hand. She uses woodbend on herself to make her hand gigantic and slaps it down over the rambunctious pigs. One accidentally detonates on impact, filling a 30' cube with spam-flavoured foam.

11. Bill panics and fires prismatic ray at another pig. He suffers his first DOOM, loses all magic for a day, and also panics. The pig explodes into a further 30' cube of pink oily foam.

12. Chaos ensues. Swainson hangs onto her pig. Tuck attaches one end of  his summoned rope to the ceiling and the other end to a pig, then hoists himself above the foamy battle below. Cazael, sick of pigs and goblins, starts hitting them left right and centre, adding more foam to the battle every time he explodes a pig. His enchanted ice sword starts freezing the foam and the mist from the river, adding to the environmental chaos.

13. Bill, now devoid of magic, realizes he's leaking poison gas from his ears. His capture wind spell that he'd banked many weeks ago had three hours of poison gas from a trap inside it. It was now boiling out of his brain. Heroically, but perhaps not wisely, Bill leapt into the river to save his friends. He would spend the next three hours clinging to a rock, periodically dipping his head into the water, and shivering.

14. The foam briefly cleared to give the party a glimpse of the sonic pigs signing a formal treaty with the goblins. No one was sure if that actually happened, but when the foam finally faded into a thick layer of spam-grease, the goblins were just as excitable as before. They also has 12 identical pig spines to trade to the Temple of Arithane.

15. Secretly, the goblins ran back to buy a second duplication potion from the medicine sellers "for later".

Sherbakov Stanislav

16. The party returned to the Temple of Arithane. On the way, a strange swarm of void wisps, little semi-magical creatures, swarmed the party. They demanded they break their oath to Yorminthal the Giant and kill him. The party readily agreed. When strange little elemental things tell you to do something, you do it, especially when you're down a wizard and up several coats of pig foam.

17. Only Swainson and Cazael had questions for the oracle. They banked the rest of their spines for future questions. Swainson wanted to know where Yorminthal was. "Just 200 yards away". And where was Tschana, the knight Cazael had once served? "In the land between life and death. Not dead, not dying, but living neither."

18. After resting overnight, the party continues their journey along the river. They get lost, hear screaming, and encounter a belligerent Beholder. The multi-eyed horror began firing eye-rays at everyone. As, once again, panic broke out, Christen Bell used her magic bells to put the creature to sleep. 

"Hurry friends!" Tuck said, handing one end of his summoned rope Postidon-Pru to Cazael. The two ran in opposite directions around the slumbering Beholder, wrapping it in 230' of rope. As the Beholder, now wrapped like a ball of yarn, began to wake up, Tuck connected the two ends of the rope. It began to rapidly contract to 5' long, squeezing the surprised Beholder. It tried one last burst of disintegrate, but the rope held. The Beholder... burst.

Magical chunks of meat and strange fluids rained down on the party. The Beholder's meat was too tempting for Swainson, Bill, and the Goblins to resist. Despite Cazael's protests, they gulped down gobbets of octarine-tinged flesh.

Swainson became more charismatic. She also gained a second face on the back of her head, a smile that lingered in the air like a floating crescent, and a few other minor mutations and perks.

The Many Goblins became wizards, sort of. Mechanically, they gained a magic dice and a spell slot. No one was quite sure what happened, but the goblins all started wearing pointy hats, cobweb beards, and going, "hrrrm, wozard stuff," from this day forward.

Bill tried a few lumps of flesh and only felt a bit wiser. Disappointed, he gorged himself and went permanently insane.

19. Luckily, Bill still couldn't cast spells, and he was physically unimpressive. The party tied him up, gagged him, and Christen Bell put him to sleep with her bells. They debated what to do next. Cazael seriously suggested leaving him behind, but Tuck had a better idea. He had a silver key that let him access dreams.

"My cult once used this key to enter the dreams of... initiates. We would feast on their dreams of food and emerge fully nourished. Nice boring dreams, nice boring initiates. And drugged too. But..."
"No," Cazael said.
"To rescue your friend?" Tuck said, playing on the fighter's sympathies.
"Fine," the spiderling sighed. "Anyone else want to go into the wizard's dreams?"
"I should stay out here," Christen Bell said hastily, "in case he starts to wake up."
"And I'm the only wizard left. Besides, putting one wizard inside another one is probably a sin or something," Swainson said.
"Yap," said the goblins, nodding in unison.

20. And so it was that Cazael, Tuck, and an entire string of goblins grasped the silver key, stuck it into Bill's ear, turned it, and vanished in a smooth schlorp of magic.

21. Inside Bill's fevered and nightmarish visions, the diverse and terrified group battled through fragments of memory, delusions, and false paths to reach the metastasizing beholder-madness clawing at Bill's mind. The goblins blinded it while Cazael, dream-ice-sword in hand, smashed it's central eye. The anti-magic core shattered, blasting all magic out of Bill's head, but also all magically-induced magic.

It was very lucky indeed that Bill was cut off from magic. If the dream-explorers had entered while he still had spells in his head, the spells would probably have devoured them. If he'd been fully charged with magic when a dream-beholder's anti-magic burst went off inside his mind, he would no doubt have died, or been driven mad. But for 24hrs, thanks to his Doom, he was a mundane wormling.

Cazael, Tuck, and (one can only hope) all of the Goblins were ejected from Bill's ear. The wizard woke up refreshed and at least as sane as he'd been before his Beholder-induced madness.

During their escape, the goblins had grabbed a dream-spellbook from dream-Bill and, somehow, brought it into the real world. The dream-spellbook contained only dream spells which, ordinarily, wouldn't have any effect in the real world (because they use dream-logic and dream-physics), but in the hands of the goblins...

22. Continuing their journey, the party ran into two leather-wrapped squidlings setting up a trap. The party set up an ambush of their own. While they suceeded in dispatching two of the servile humanoids, they did not expect a strange tentacled creature in black robes to slither around the corner. It fixed the party with a hungry, inhuman glare, and unleashed its full mind powers.

23. The party proved too stupid for its psychic assault (none of the characters have an Int above 11). It took control of Bill, but the wizard still lacked magic and could only flail as the rest of the party beat the tentacled horror to death. They looted several valuable occultum pieces from its purse along with a few articles of strange technology.


What else would they find on their journey to the Fungid Valley? Can Bill continue to avoid his well-deserved demise? How many dangerous items can the party carry at once?

Find out next session.

OSR: Veins of the Earth, Session 6

Last session, the PCs fought a ferret, freed a giant, and gained several friends.
The party consists of:
Cazael the spiderling fighter. The leader of the group by default.
Bill the wormling Orthodox Wizard. Has antlers and telekinesis thanks to strange potions. Thinks life underground is just peachy.
Swainson the Garden Wizard. Formerly a hawkling, currently a dryad.
Christen Bell the weasel-ling Bell Exorcist. Keeps vanishing and returning, possibly on secret errands, possibly just has a poor sense of direction.
Many Goblins. Full of teeth, bad plans, and poor impulse control.

Tuck the Flealing summoner. Extremely untrustworthy, constantly scheming, but so far both loyal and useful.

Starting by the "Entombed Giant" in the bottom right.

1. The party made a deal with Yorminfulgar, the cartilaginous cave giant trapped under a heap of boulders. If he provided the location of a valuable treasure, the party would retrieve the treasure, return, and free him.

He agreed, provided the party answered one of his horrible and disturbing riddles. The party wasn't sure what would happen if they got the riddle wrong, but didn't want to risk it. "Probably get cursed or something," Swainson said wisely. They managed to get the right answer.

2. Yorminfulgar told them of "an amulet, a trinket, more precious than life itself" and gave them directions to find it.

2. After getting lost for a few hours, the party finds the limestone caves in the giant's directions. Using Tuck's shadow-summons as a scout, they check the depths of every crevice until they find the amulet. They also find the long-rotted remains of a cave explorer who had died trying to force his arm into the crevice.

3. The amulet was an elegant hourglass in a silver case. Instead of sand, each grain was a miniature skull. Staring into the hourglass gave the wizards a headache, but Swainson and Bill eventually figured out it was enchanted with powerful life-preserving magic and decided to wear it.

Side Note: the players haven't figured it out yet, but the amulet does preserve life. Invariably. As long as someone wears it their soul will remain bound to their body. Death Becomes Her-style rules, so hopefully you didn't die from falling off a cliff. The amulet doesn't dull pain or madness.

4. While trying to find their way back, the party encounters a transparent jelly pyramid with a toothy skeletal maw, eyes, and a digestive system inside. This being the weirdest thing they'd encountered by far, Bill prevaricated between fireball and prismatic spray, his two most powerful spells.

He chose fireball. The blast stopped a few inches away from his face. A few more feet and the entire party would have burnt. Delighted with his magical control (and unwilling to admit it was luck), Bill let off prismatic ray. The acidic bolt he conjured fully healed the ooze.

5. The party discovered they could flee at full speed and still berate the wizard. 

6. They wandered for several hours, totally lost, before finding a cave with a mysterious machine. Its design was inscrutable. It resembled the inner workings of a clock tower combined with a lectern, a pile of metal bones, and an alchemist's secret tools. Most of the party took one look at the machine and decided to leave it alone, but Tuck and Christen decided to investigate its many drawers. They found several "metal leeches", a pile of fishhooks, and a few scraps of wire. They gave the fishhooks and pills to the goblins.

Side Note: Tuck and Christen have entered the dEr0 Conspiracy. Special dEr0 encounters will be noted in the courier font. The goblins are too weird for the Conspiracy to increase the amount of bullshit in their lives. They did enjoy the effects of the conspiracy pills though.

7. After several more hours and a few close calls with strange creatures and noises in the dark, the party managed to locate Yorminfulgar the giant once again. They decided to free him. Using Tuck's summoned rope, the strength of Many Goblins, and Swainson's party trick, the party hauled several enormous slabs of rock off the giant.

Side Note: Swainson's party trick is very cunning. She was transformed into a dryad back in Session 2. As a garden wizard, she also knows the woodbend and obedient stone spells. Obedient stone requires a stone to fit into the palm of the wizard's hand. With woodbend, a dryad's hand can become large enough to enfold a boulder.

8. Once freed, Yorminfulgar thanked the party and slithered away bonelessly. They noticed his gigantic gold and diamond necklace and, silently, cursed their fate.

9. The giant's departure and the general rearrangement of the cave and rockfall had revealed another strange machine. Tuck went to investigate. This device was smaller and had a large red switch on one side. Tuck flicked the switch.

10. The machine began shake violently. With each passing second, the vibrations grew more intense. Slabs of rock began to peel from the walls. A true earthquake began.

11. Tuck opened the back panel of the machine, removed a large and dangerous-looking box, and along with the rest of the party fled the collapsing caves. No one was seriously injured but most of the party sported bumps, bruises, and scrapes. The box seemed to be some sort of magic reservoir made of a dangerous material the party had previously encountered. The two cables on either side, formerly connected to the arcane earthquake machine, were very tempting to Bill. He guessed that connecting them together would start a magical feedback loop.

12. Cazael took the magic box away from Bill.

13. After sleeping (guarded by goblins, despite their initial reservations), the party set out once again. They encountered a ghoul minefield. Ghouls, paralytic with hunger, had been buried with just their paralyzing claws exposed. Luckily, the party evaded the mines. They decided to avoid the large caves and stick to small, uncomfortable, and difficult passages, reasoning they were less likely to be mined.

14. Some time later, the party discovered the Ghoul Fortress of Baron Sulyvhan. Tuck decided the ghouls might want to trade for information or valuables. The party was unlikely to be attacked if they pretended to be traders.

15. The two wizards, Swainson and Bill, decided that they didn't want to participate in this scheme. They'd provide fire support from a distance. "If things go wrong, just signal me and fwoosh," Bill said, making an expanding fireball gesture.

16. Ghoul Baron Sulyvhan was not a rich or prosperous baron. His fortress, built into a cave wall and protected by a ghoul minefield, contained him, a single ghoul warrior, one ravening feral ghoul chained in the gatehouse, and several fearful human servants (or possibly mobile larder). Still, the Baron was courteous, and invited the party to a mildewed and dust-covered banquet table, Miss Havisham-style. They traded away some of their loot for gold and oil and a map to the "fungid valley", whatever that was.

16.The Baron also informed the PCs that Yorminfulgar was, "a pariah among his kind" and that he never forgot a debt. "But not, I think, in the manner you hope. He hates to be seen in weakness and will destroy anyone who aids him."

Worried, the party left the Ghoul Baron behind. Swainson cast locate animal to try and detect Yorminfulgar. She was horrified to discover that the cave giant was just 300' away from the party, lurking somewhere in the darkness, presumably tracking them by smell. Over the next few hours, Yorminfulgar got as close as 100' before retreating; only Swainson could detect him.

Will the party survive the giant's rage? What will they find in the fungid valley? Will Bill's hoard of magical artifacts spell the party's doom, or will they all die in a goblin-induced clusterfuck?

Find out next session.