Category: Dungeon of the Mad Mage

The party wends around this first level of the mad dungeon and finds the easy side of the secret door discovered in the well room a couple of hours ago. Friggiedi looks through the eyeholes but does not see the recent past.

Friggiedi opens the door at the end of a long hallway. The large hall features three large, waterdhavian noble statues. The statues, from south to north, bear the engraved labels Elyndraun, Ruathyndar, and Onthalass. Subsequent goblin emendation relabeled them as Smelly Bottom, Stupid Skull, and Born Toothless, respectively.

Togy locates a broken magical staff in a pile of bones. Friggiedi holds the halves together for Togy to mend. The repaired staff loudly yells, Help! Thief! Criminal! The ruckus attracts a coven of “vampires” who seek to separate dungeon crawling adventurers from their coins. Reade and Morn select “vampire” Kenny and separate him from his insides, sprayed admonishingly across the wall. His cohorts surrender except for one hard-hitting  “vampire”, Dannh, whom Smoll and Morn reduce to his original pocketless, gray, monstrous form.

The acquiescent survivors direct the party toward the lair of their boss, Uktarl. Uktarl runs the criminal gang, or at least what is left of it since his girlfriend, Harria, split the gang and went north. The survivors, actors who could not make a living topside, are given one gold each to exit the dungeon and not return.

The party easily locates Uktarl with his remaining “vampires”. Uktarl gets immediately jumped with a hex from Morn and blindness from Togy. He yields quickly and often. Smoll, unsatisfied with the pace of surrendering, makes an example of Stannh who, like Dannh, returns to a gray monstrosity once slain. Again, all survivors are allowed one gold each to exit the dungeon.

The party secures the vampire lair and takes an hour to recuperate.

The sahuagin statue room turns out to be the abode of a gray ooze whom Friggiedi finds most distasteful. Smoll and Reade quickly slay Gary the Gray Ooze. Smoll, Reade, and Morn find no secrets in the room and the magic head turns out to just be a lame light spell. The party returns to the demon carving room.

Friggiedi locates another secret door around a dretch carving which Reade easily opens. The hidden room features a longsword conspicuously displayed in the center near a severed skeletal hand and splatters of dried blood. Smoll picks up the [+1] longsword but cannot manage to set it [cursed] down again. Also of interest are voices emitting from some air vents in the ceiling, but no one can make any sense of the gibberish language.

Sensing no threats other than Smoll Scissorhands waving around her intractable longsword, the room seems safe enough for a short rest to bandage injuries.

The party moves out west and north through apparently unremarkable hallways.

Lif is rebuilt over the next six months and reopens. Half orc Friggiedi and all-human Morn Amblecrown make a visit and find Reade tending bar. Reade offers libations. Morn, referred to the adventurers-for-hire by local character Volo, counteroffers a job to locate a missing person. The bad news is that missing Kressando Rosznar’s last known location was in the undermountain beneath the yawning portal. The further bad news is that Kressando is mixed up with slave traders and Xanathar. If there is any good news at all, it’s that Kressando’s sister Esvele Rosznar is loaded with all that lucrative slavetrader wealth of the Rosznar family, and the dungeon itself might contain some finders-keepers valuables. Kressando, or his fresh corpse, can be identified by his platinum signet ring featuring the Roznar crest, a white falcon on a field of blue and their “Fly high stoop swift” motto.

The new party meets up at the Yawning Party. Janky strikes up a social convo with local down-on-his-luck adventure guy Maloon whose CV includes: attacked by Xanathar, eaten up by a brain dog, and thrown out of Force Gray. Maloon’s professional recommendation, whatever that’s still worth, is to avoid going into the undermountain.

Morn approaches extrovert Volo, busily recounting an unrecognizable version of the liberation of the dragon hoard. Volo explains the ancient history of the undermountain which began as the epic project of one Harrister Allekeep who organized some wizards, started a tower going upward, and then pivoted downward to duergar and drow stratum. Much later, entrepreneur Durnam came along and exploited the commercial potential of the dungeon entrance which inherently and monopolistically prohibits magical ingress and egress.

The party pays Durnam’s descent fees and gets lowered to the bottom of the yawn. Nearby skeletons attest to the perils of not setting aside ascent fees. A secret door, inaccessible from this side, suggests a shortcut out of the dungeon from somewhere.

The only (accessible) path into the dungeon is a tunnel that takes the party to a hall of demons carved into the walls. A skeleton has either been arranged to point to a secret door or someone died pointing to a secret door some time ago. Beyond the secret door, a tunnel descends slightly to a carving that warns of certain death. A stench warns of the certain untreated sewage that floods the chamber at the other end of the tunnel. Just around the corner where the sewage gets deeper the party glimpses a sahuagin statue wearing a magical hat, if detect magic serves.