Category: Dungeon of the Mad Mage

After an uneventful long rest, the party returns to the cobra woman statue room to have a look at the well-crafted doors which do not open conventionally. Friggiedi intuitively jams three fingers into an indent wheel built into the door, clicks the wheel outward into an unlocked position releasing a seal, and rolls the doors open.

Janky meets an apparition of Hallaster Blackcloak aka The Mad Mage seated on an oak chair with an upside-down portrait of his person on the wall. The apparition offers to consider three of Janky’s questions on the topic of the dungeon which will be answered by two truths and a lie. Janky confers with the group via Togy’s sendings, and the same question is asked three times to ensure an accurate answer.

Hey, old buddy. Are you alive? Where at? Can you get back? How can we help you? Morn says, hi. You can reply to this.

I am alive. Biggish room. Misty portal. Old man: Hallaster Blackcloak. Three questions, two truths, one lie. If you can, send questions.

One question three times to ensure accuracy: Where is Kressando Roznar? If that is not fun then you can ask how to get back. Whatever.

From this query it is determined that Kressando Roznar is not only deceased but scattered across the third dungeon level. His ring, as proof of unlife, may still be around. The apparition of Hallaster Blackcloak disappears for Janky.

Janky returns to the party using the bronze mask and naked man portal. Reade borrows the mask and discovers the question-answering apparition is freshly available for him. Reade deduces that each party member may reliably glean one certain piece of information, or three uncertain ones, by returning to this portal.

The revved-up party continues south to chase around some goblins that Morn has identified.

Following a restorative short rest, the party retraces west and turns south to a door that was found but not yet explored. Janky finds more hallway beyond but notices one tile is suspiciously missing grout along one edge. When Morn prods at it with his ten-foot pole, all the other tiles in the hallway unexpectedly launch upward violently compressing Morn, Janky, and Reade into the ceiling before gently settling back into the normal elevation for a hallway floor.

Determined to explore, acquire, and/or disable the floor launching apparatus embedded beneath the hallway, the party uses Morn’s ten-foot pole to jack up the floor while Togy, Janky, and Reade extract the magical air source. The trap is disabled, and its primary pneumatic source is handed over to Morn in compensation for his possibly damaged ten-foot pole.

The next room features a pair of columns supporting an arch. The structure resembles a portal, but magical detection suggests it would operate in a weakened state if at all. A pair of martially-terminated orc skeletons around each pillar discourage further exploration beyond tossing an osseous orc digit back and forth through the arch with no interesting results.

The next room is silent, but only enough to be a little eerie. Reade locates the upper half of a skeletal tiefling hanging from wall manacles on the eastern wall. Friggedei finds its presumed lower half bones collected in a pile on the opposite side of the room. Morn reads the phrase “Talk To Me” scrawled in blood above the manacles in an unknown language. Cheeky Morn prepends the text to read, “Don’t Talk To Me”.

Reade leads the party on through a south exit to yet another hallway, apparently the preferred architecture of the Mad Mage. Wherever Reade walks down the hallway, the tiles turn dark and shadowy. He returns along the same path making those tile even darker and shadowy-er. Morn supposes the traversed tiles would eventually darken and degrade into some sort of pit of despair from repeated use, so the party takes a 10-minute rest to study the floor’s recovery while Togy ritualizes a fresh detection of magic. During that time the floor lightens back to its original condition. By dividing into a north and south file, the party safely traverses the darkening hall with no despairing consequences.

The next room has a busty statue of what Reade, after digging out the surrounding rubble, eventually determines to be a snake woman person of unknown identity.

The party follows a hewn tunnel behind the statue that wends around into a small room to the north containing exactly one recently deceased goblin. The cause of death is blunt force trauma to the dome, the manner of death is goblicide. Of note is the Xanathar tattoo found on the gobby’s hand.

The party follows a long hallway north back to the room of pillars just off the hall of demons where signage promised certain death back the way they came. Up to this point in time the warning seems more directed at the goblin population than adventurers.

A long, long rest in Urktal’s lair is punctuated by dreams of the Frostmaiden’s Rime.

Proceeding north from the hall of mirrors, Janky leads the party into a room littered with emptied potion bottles and other evidence of discarded adventuring. Togy and Janky point Smoll to an unmortared brick in the far wall where she retrieves a skein of unicorn braid from behind the brick. Morn identifies the fibrous assembly as a bowstring [+1 unbreakable] which Janky fashions into a refurbished shortbow christened Flossy.

Janky leads the party south into the recently vacated goblin area. A room east features a central pile of 17 dark stone pieces that Friggiedi realizes, in a flash of savant, could be reassembled into a carved statue of three human warriors. Attempts to reassemble the statue through feats of intellect are ironically interrupted by a sneaking brain dog. Smoll and Janky grease it before it can devour any of Friggiedi’s intellect.

Morn and Janky follow a hallway south that wraps back around to a room with a full scale marionette skeleton suspended by rope from the ceiling. Embossment on a nearby cleaved shield suggests the decedent might be Nimraith, adherent of Lathander. The party liberates his 100 year old remains from the undignified suspension and improvises a blanket shroud and shield monument.

Janky confidently proceeds through a door to the south right onto three waiting shortbow arrows from a goblin defense. Smoll bum-rushes the buick of goblins right behind her own flying hand axes and right ahead of the party taking cover behind her. Morn hexblasts a quad of goblins, painting a mural on the wall with their remains. Smoll bashes the bugbear officer with some flossing support by Janky and continues with two follow-up goblins for dessert. Friggiedi breaks out a mace that procs every hit on three goblins slain.

Discouraged by Morn’s momentary demise, the party camps for the night in the chambers formerly known as Uktarl’s.

Smoll leads the refreshed and revived group back to the mirror hall for another go. The plan this time is to send one adventurer through at a time, methodically engaging copies under an intense focus of ranged attacks before any strength drain can occur. Smoll goes first and experiments with different paths and avoids looking at the mirrors. The same mirrors seem to always make copies while the other mirrors never do.

Janky goes through next and tries different paths while admiring himself in all the mirrors, but again the same mirrors always make copies.

Morn leaps over the suspected floor triggers, but still the same mirrors make copies. His progress is interrupted halfway across when a chanting, laughing patrol of goblins attack Smoll and Janky on the far side. They are repelled for the moment at the cost of a couple of goblins.

Reade suggests a survey of magic detection. Togy identifies the copy-producing mirrors as conjuration magic and one other mirror as illusion magic. Friggiedi explores through the illusion but feels only empty shelves. Janky follows her lead and locates another illusion mirror on his end and finds a bronze mask which he slips on. In addition to enhancing his rugged handsomeness, the masks visage seems vaguely familiar.

When an angry roar presages the return of the fortified goblins, Morn decides to try dispelling the magic mirrors with some well-placed blasts of eldritch. The method proves highly effective, so it is open season on the conjuration mirrors. The party arranges a defense and quickly defeats the bugbear-enhanced goblin surge.

A short rest restores not only health but also drained strength.

West from Uktarl’s ceded area of control, the party sneaks into a room of mortared bones serving as the den for a pair of grells. Smoll gets grappled more than she prefers, but the party otherwise benefits from an uncharacteristic superiority in damage and wipes them out.

Smoll rests up while Janky and Togy locate some modest riches in the unfortunate remains of misadventuring grell meals [4gp, 13sp]. A discarded bone flute in particular piques Janky’s interest but the sounds of a passing skull-seeking  goblin patrol extinguish any spontaneous jam session.

The party, continuing to follow the dungeon’s right wall, traces back to the column forest off the demon hall. The east hallway features opposing oval mirrors which, when traversed, tend to make aggro copies of the party members. Although not especially tough, the doppelgangers have the alarming effect of draining away strength, in Morn’s case to death.

Morn gets revivified and the party makes a fighting retreat away from the mirror hall  to consider options.

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.