PROLOGUE
“We have a priority one job! Priority one, people!” shouts Rooster as he dashes into the Warren. A gnome barely three feet high and with a red beard and matching tuft of hair on top, Rooster has been a company man longer than any of the other mission managers. “Bizzle! Nanny! Beard! Mumbles! Jingles! Squat! Grab your gear, we’re scrambling now!”. Rooster grabs his goggled helm from his hutch and continues through the Warren.
“Sir, Mumbles was eaten by that Owlbear!” chimes a random voice.
“Dag nabbit, you need a scribe! Strings! Can you scribe?”
“Yessir! On it sir!” responds Strings grabbing his gear.
The sun is just beginning to set.
“Jingles and Squat on this mission!?!” quips Bizzle to his equals, “They’re bringing in full shares! We’re in the big leagues now!”
“Don’t pee yourself yet, get your gear and get to the terminal! Move it!”
Donning your trademark Greycoats, and grabbing your gear you rush out to the terminal where the company vehicles are parked. You reach the nearest “B.A.D.G.R.” and wait for Rooster to drop the gangway. With tank treads and blades protruding from every direction, the “B.A.D.G.R.” is the peak of dwarf/gnome war machinery.
Rooster chuckles as he passes you, “Not today, we’re in the P.T.A.T.A.!”
“Hooray, the Potato!” shouts Beard.
“It’s P’tata you ninny!” responds Rooster, the “Personnel Transport And Tactical Air-support”.
“He says Potato, you say P’tata, let’s call the whole thing off and take the B.A.D.G.R!” decries Bizzle.
“Get to the P’tata you whiny sparrows!”
Just then a lithe figure, taller than any gnome or dwarf, strides in. The trademark Greycoat tailored to their height. Nothing can be seen of the figure, every patch of skin is covered by goggles, a leather skull cap, gloves and a face mask. The figure strides silently save for two copper coins being rolled back and forth across the gloved hand, causing the faintest “clink” each time they cross in the middle. Save a bare metal rod clutched in one hand, “Jingles” has no other discernible weapons.
Trudging behind the tall quiet Jingles is “Squat”, a dwarf nearly as wide as Jingles is tall. With hands like cudgels, and legs thicker than 100 year old tree stumps, Squat has his trademark war maul, “the Old Lady” slung on his shoulder.
Both of the full share partners stride to the P’tata, the metal cylinder with rounded ends roughly 12 paces in diameter and 40 paces in length. The gangway drops from the back rounded end revealing a narrow passage inside the vehicle. The walls are 10′ thick and there are no windows save a small portal at the front just above a high stool surrounded by gears and knobs.
Rooster pushes his way between Jingles and Squat, strides down the length of the P’tata hold, and jumps up on the pilot stool.
The hold is lined with netting that can be adjusted for seating or simply held onto. You file in and grab a patch of net while Rooster frantically begins turning a wheel. The gangway rises and you hear a whirring noise and the clank as the wings unfold. You’ve seen it many times, the gull wings of the P’tata rising and then beginning to flap madly as the unnatural giant iron potato takes flight. You settle in, catching a nap before your mission.
….
Several hours later the floor of the P’tata illuminates revealing a moonlit keep nestled in a valley between plateaus. The building appears decayed on one side with a garden visible on one corner. “Jingles! Squat! This is your splatter-miffin! You’ve got your orders!” and the gangway in back once again opens while the P’tata maintains flight. “Pickup is a double shake!”
“Do we jump here Rooster!” shouts Bizzle gripping his scimitars.
“No! You don’t think we’d send half-shares on a priority one? This is a dual deployment, we have a priority four mission you mutton heads need to salvage; the timing was just convenient to take you all together.”
Jingles strides to the end of the gangway, and turns facing you and then slowly steps off backward, dropping straight down. Squat strides to the end of the gangway and just leans forward, choosing a head first approach for his dive. The two full-share R&S employees quickly disappear from sight as the gangway rises and the floor goes dark once more.
Rooster tosses back a mission packet with a large “4” scrawled on the cover. “Familiarize yourself with the mission; your splatter-miffin is in one shake!”
Inside the mission packet the contract reads:
Ransom and Salvage Recovery Contract
Location: Sighing Valley, highest peak south of Knifepoint Gulley just above the Lost River
Customer: Ardak Mroranon
Priority: 4
Objectives:
Recover tome “the journal of Eccton Fffyth”
Recover tome “Astral Projection and the Elemental Plane”
Recover brooch, Green Oak leaf with mithral filigree, possibly hung on a chain
Premium paid for any other “personal” items found among the target objectives
Background:
Nine days ago, a cohort of seven hands from Quastarte were conducting studies in the Sighing Valley. They were attacked by a Manticore when they accidentally stumbled into the beast’s lair. Four were apparently eaten, but three managed to escape back to their university. Quastarte finds the missing texts and the brooch to be quite valuable and would like them back. The survivors provided directions to the lair. It is presumed that the Manticore ate the scholars, and that any items will have “passed” by now. Your mission is to get into the lair, find the Manticore dung and search it for the missing articles. Appropriate protective clothing will be provided. Be wary of the Manticore, do not be stupid.
An hour later you feel the P’tata slowing and the gentle bump as you realize it has landed. The gangway opens onto a rocky plateau with a cave entrance visible 60 paces away.
Rooster spins in his stool to address you “Alright Sallies: Waffasmig if necessary, Schmuuuuu the dung, and Skeedaddle. I’ll be back in a double shake, go!”
You file toward the back of the P’tata grabbing a set of “dung diggers” hanging in the netting at the back, and then proceed into the night headed for the cave opening. The P’tata lifts off as soon as the last of you is out, its awkward flapping stirs up a chaotic pattern of dust as it departs.
”Who remembers anything about Manticores?” whispers Strings as you all reach the opening of the cave….
LOGUE
Rooster’s P.T.A.T.A leaves The Specialists at the entrance to an ancient temple for a double shake recovery of the effects of a doomed adventuring party. The half-share team is so confident they waste several valuable minutes just discussing pork.
Work ethic intervenes and Nanny, the trap and lock specialist, disarms a tripwire in such a way no one could even tell it is disabled and gives a gwen tiiku ront (thumbs up). The team moves over the inert wire to the left to work on a closed stone door which seems less travelled than other, more inviting, passages around the entry. The door’s mechanism is elusive but eventually Nanny notices the nearby statue is loose. Beard, in rat form, sniffs around and detects the presence of manure in the building, good news as the contract specifies the sought artifacts are expected in manticore spoor, but it’s best not to dwell on that. Strings rotates the statue and the door slides aside to reveal a pressure plate on the other side. Beyond the door, the adventurers don’t need rat senses to access the stench of death. Nanny, Strings, and Bizzle acrobat around the plate while rat Beard squeaks across the plate, too light to have an effect.
Nanny explores along the left wall and, rounding a corner, discovers a reclining skeleton in the corridor. Bizzle peers over her shoulder and confirms: skeleton. Strings advances closer and glyphs glow on the floor when a strum of power courses audibly through the air animating the skeleton. Strings comments scathingly of the skeleton’s parentage, discombobulating it into missing its attack on Bizzle. Nanny, seizing the confusion, sneak attacks and reduces the skeleton to dust. Beard, as a rat, ducks behind two more skeletons attracted by the tussle, reverts to Gnome form, and magically dispels one skeleton like it never existed. Bizzle gives his scimitar attacks everything he’s got but comes up short and Strings takes out the third skeleton. Skeleton four makes a critical attack on Beard but Nanny pulverizes it in a single move. With showman’s panache, Beard sidles up to skeleton five. Boo Boo the Badger leaps from interdimensional space within his forked beard, clamors up through the inside of the skeleton’s rib cage, and bites him in the neck bones. Bizzle’s dual scimitars slice through above and below Boo Boo who emerges from the crumbling fifth skeleton with a prize bone fragment and leaps back into forked beard space.
Nanny checks the shelves in the end of the next corridor and declares them free of traps. Strings, mission’s scribe of record, registers and recovers the shelved potions into inventory and the team continues down to the opposite end where Nanny locates a pressure plate trap. Confident from her success with the earlier trip wires, Nanny slides a piton under the plate while unknowingly leaning on an irregularly shaped corner, setting off a poisoned dart trap that hits her and Strings. Standard issue curative potions are consumed.
Pushing ahead, Bizzle finds an earthen jar with a lid. Beard experimentally hits it with a dispel which has an injurious effect on the jar’s contents, shaking the lid and emitting smoky puffs of anger. Beard retreats a bit and Bizzle counts down three before using a scimitar to flip the lid away. A ghost pops out and Bizzle swings at it with too much momentum for the semi-corporeal target and slices into poor Nanny. Primordial glyphs flash a warning, probably to not mess with the jar. Strings whispers sweet dissonances at the ghost who careens away, his last hit point dangling, and dies irretrievably in the wall, significantly lowering the resale value of the temple.
Strings is busy recovering an arrow brooch from the pile of bones in the jar when the sound of a 43 pound adventurer falling through a trap door is heard from around the corner where Nanny is scouting the path ahead for traps. Beard starts dropping torches to lend both light and weight to the search. Strings finds the trap and beats on it with his rapier. Suddenly remembering the crowbar he’s sentimentally lugged around since his criminally misspent youth, Bizzle pries up one edge of the trap door. Ten feet down to the subfloor, Nanny beats back swarms of beetles nibbling at her tasty limbs. Strings lowers his rope of climbing and fishes out Nanny. Beard spider-walks around the 4’ menace left by the broken trap, but Bizzle mends the door with a piece of mithril banding so it is safe for the other three to traverse.
Pressing forward with more caution, the team finds and descends stairs toward the promisingly lucrative aroma of manure. Bizzle and Nanny scope the room for traps and also whatever may have come through the recently collapsed wall and bitten that manticore in half with a single bite. The room shows all the signs of a happy manticore home with nesting materials and dung heaps. Strings, with his S&R issued Dung Diggers®, and Beard, with his rat-form indifference to filth, go to work looking for the contract artifacts in the dung. Bizzle locates the Green Oakleaf brooch on the remaining manticore half and Beard rats a coin purse out of the dung. Strings records and recovers the brooch and the purse contents of some gold and one of Ardak’s metal cards.
Following along the right wall the group bypasses a stone door with a pressure plate until the easy open passages are explored first. Beard recons down a short corridor leading to an amphitheater across which a starter hoard holds up a snoozing young red dragon, no big deal. Beard pulls himself together and retreats to share the good news. Meanwhile Strings has found another stone door down a second corridor. Whatever unpleasantness awaits behind the two closed doors has to be better than a dragon, so those are opened while Strings covers the noise with silence to not awake the dragon.
The first enclosed room is small and empty but the back wall has been cracked enough by the damage caused by the dragon that a person, not a dragon, could squeeze through if the situation ever happens to come up. The second closed door conceals an even smaller room with a treasure chest which, when opened, yields 240 pp of money-smelling money. Purely coincidentally, some creature in another room sneezes just like a dragon would if it was awake.
Strings concocts a cunning plan to access the dragon’s hoard. Beard will carry half the coin concealed in his standard issue bag-of-holding-equipped Greycoat grey coat back to the first enclosed room where the dragon will be attracted to the coin but unable to immediately get to it. Beard, invisible and silenced, should then escape either through the door or through the crack, whichever is less blocked by dragon, while the other three search the unguarded horde for the unaccounted items. Once the items are secured and Beard reunites at eagle speed, Bizzle will helm teleport everyone to safety. Bob is everyone’s uncle.
The first thing that goes wrong is that Bizzle, peeking into the amphitheater, sees the hoard but zero dragons. By that time Beard has already left in the opposite direction, invisible, taped with silencing mithril banding and masked with dung smell. Nanny and Strings stack up with Bizzle and none of them can spy the dragon either, a puzzle solved moments later when unaware Beard triggers the sliding stone door and the dragon, revealed from stealth, fills the small room with fire. Beard’s double fire resistance keeps him alive and he dumps the 120 pp to hopefully distract the dragon. He makes for the crack while in the amphitheater his three cohorts raid the hoard. Nanny finds the last two artifacts and begins monitoring the telepathic ether for Beard’s invisible return. Beard flees down the improvised dragon passage in the direction of the hoard, changing to eagle’s form mid stride. He gets some distance ahead of the dragon and lands on Bizzle’s shoulder. Strings drops the invisibility and Bizzle skims the helm of teleportation quick start guide as the furious dragon storms around into view. Using the Dung Diggers® to anchor the teleport, Bizzle beams the party back to the P’tata, surprising Rooster, but the dragon wasn’t born on a giant turnip truck yesterday and flies from the mountain lair to attack. Rooster regains his composure and deploys the Gatling javelin cannons which narratively discourages the dragon.
EPILOGUE
…Pickup …
In an instant, Bizzle, Nanny, Strings and an eagle reappear in the hold of the P’tata. Jingles and Squat are seated near the front of the hold with three wrapped bodies at their feet. Each of the corpses has been bound in R&S Standard shrouds, magically conforming to the bodies and suppressing any stench. Jingles appears to be inspecting a crystal rod attached to a chain, presumably some sort of amulet. Squat is admiring a clockwork goldfish swimming in a perfect glass sphere, tapping on the glass with his stumpy fingers.
“Where did you?!? What the!?!” Screams Rooster as he stares out the forward portal at a Red Dragon rising up at his ship over his landing zone.
“Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” Shout Bizzle, Nanny and Strings. The eagle shrieks a similar message then shifts back to the gnome known as Beard.
Jingles and Squat look up at the sudden noisy appearance of ‘team 2’, and Rooster spins in the stool repeating himself “Where did you?!? What the!?!”
“No time! We gotta go! DRAGON”
Something slams the P’Tata as the dragon wings by whipping around for another attack. The ship slides and even Jingles grabs some net to maintain his position.
Spinning back again and staring out the portal, Rooster begins spinning another set of wheels to the left of the stool, “Oh really darlin’ you want to dance with old Rooster?”
The walls of the P’Tata hold go translucent and reveal three sets of large tubes on each side, 4 paces long, and with belts of steel Javelins feeding down into each tube. Pulling a handle and letting out a furious growl, Rooster lets fly with the full compliment that puts the “Ta” in P’tata.
Steel Javelins in rapid fire begin flying from the tubes and striking the dragon.
Diving low to avoid the teeth on this new prey, the dragon heads down into the Sighing Valley and turns right just past Knife Point Gulley.
“Ha ha! Rooster can dance!!! Rooster! Can! Dance!” chuckles the old gnome, while folding in the P’Tata armament.
“Is it dead? Please let it be dead, is it dead?” Babbles Beard.
“Nah! No one’s paying us to kill it, but I don’t think it’ll ever want to eat another Potato!” cheers Rooster as he pulls the P’Tata into a gentle curve and begins the journey back to the Warren.
…Back at the Warren…
“Nice haul, way more than what Quastarte eluded that party was carrying,” Rooster is thumbing through the loot presented by Strings. “Read me the Inventory.”
Strings rattles off “The three target items: “the journal of Eccton Fffyth”, and “Astral Projection and the Elemental Plane”, and a green oak leaf pendant with mithral filigree. Bonus recovery included 154 Platinum Pieces, 92 Gold Pieces, 4 additional tomes including, 4 potions of Necromantic nature, a brass arrow shaped pendant, a small metal business card, a golden shield, a golden helm, a brass horn, an aquamarine, two black pearls, 4 chrysoberyl, and a star ruby.”
“Total value of additional premiums at 10,032 GP”, states Rooster, doing the math in his head as Strings read it off. “Great work! That’s all of it? Nothing withheld?”
“Nothing withheld” grumbles Bizzle remembering how Strings forced him to turn over their platinum haul.
Nodding his approval Rooster acknowledges your payout, “Everyone gets a 5% cut of the bounty, including first pick from the loot, plus 400 GP each for completing the mission. Go get some rest, there are always more contracts.”
The four take their cut, and Beard looking exceptionally tired, call it a night just as the sun starts to rise.