say bye-bye

Just like before, Hate apparently had no interest in destroying Derrick, er Haddock. Whatever.

So we got ourselves teleported out of the city far away from the Northrog, and where we could intercept the dwarves and stop them marching into a nasty fight they couldn’t win.

Instead we moved on the site for Dragon Keep, and once there we made sure the rest of the cave complex was safe. Once that was done we had some time to ourselves until wizard-boy used his Stone of Slavery to get more orders from whats-her-name-who-claims-to-be-in-charge-of-the-free-kingdoms-now.

Along with her message Bobblebard had a vision (or so he calls it—I think he just has a source of pipe-weed he isn’t sharing). In this vision the Northrog are occupying that town we just left, and on the field outside is an army of humans and dwarves flanked by elves and Northrog. If it’s any sort of premonitory thing it doesn’t bode well for the dwarves.

So the instructions he got were to check out the mountains to the east where scrying wasn’t working but lots of monsters had apparently been going.

Didn’t really sound like a fun place to go, but like that’s any surprise where human affairs are involved!

It only took a few days to get there on Bodyguard’s phantom ponies. We weren’t being particularly stealthy and eventually we found a couple of one-eyed giants to talk to and they told us some sell-casting woman had moved into the area a while ago and since then everything had started going wrong—the water had turned foul, monsters had started congregating around her tower, ...

You should have seen Ohmygosh—I thought he was going to wet himself from excitement at the thought of a woman with a tower. I don’t really understand it but without knowing anything more he was singing her praises and talking about how she couldn’t possibly be bad and we should go talk to her and she’ll be our friend and it will be great and everything will turn out for the best and ... Be a man and stop drooling!

Apparently whoever this woman was she’d built a keep first and then a tower. We scoped out the area and sure enough there were a bunch of monsters but the only thing they seemed interested in was looking at the tower. Perhaps this woman wasn’t all bad—the monsters seemed oblivious of anything else and didn’t even seem that interested in taking care of themselves. Maybe they’ll all just shrivel up and die.

We scouted the tower but the only visible entry was an iron trapdoor on the roof. We used magic to get up there but the tower seemed to absord any spell that touched it and there was no mundane way to open the trapdoor so we eventually had to leave again, and through all this none of the monsters showed any interest in us. Spooky.

So the only other choice was the keep, which we assumed would be defended. While that was technically true, we had no trouble getting in the front gate and the scaly sentries were easily taken unawares and we pretty much had the run of the place.

There was some nice stuff in here and I swear a tear came to my eye when Malakar was the first to suggest a bit of healthy pillaging. Some of the artwork depicted snake-haired people and Obligate said it was some ancient extinct race called the Medusans who had been incredibly advanced. Not so advanced as to avoid dying out, eh????

Apart from a few more scalies we waltzed through the place and Abjurate said the books we found talked about creating some weird device to do some major plane-crashing or something.

Thanks to some handy work by yours truly we found a hidden workshop with a transportation circle, and I bet it takes us into the tower. I just hope there’s an easy way back out as well, because thus far the indications are that magic will be utterly useless in there.