Journal 28: The Three Heirs

General Summary

Dungeon crawling

At the coin door we rest to prepare for whatever lies ahead. Naiur beats Manford a little to make him talk. It doesn't work. Naiur then enters the coin door first. He jumps through like a real athlete, but scrapes his head on the top of the way through. One of the lights in the eye sockets of the skull goes out. Wren follows. Then Harvey enters, but gets stuck. After a little pushing and pulling, he manages to get through. The rest of the team follows. Since only two people can enter before the door closes, Shynt uses the Immovable Rod to keep the mouth-door open.   We follow a set of stairs down into a wide open garden-like room, with the river moving through it. Several sections contain different types of vegetation. After moving partway through the room, two elven kids suddenly appear behind us, waking up. They are named Riff and Raff. They tell us they were captured by cultists. Their story seems sketchy and they want us to go forward, into a big room. We interrogate them a little, and Riff, getting antsy, suddenly turns into a rat and scurries away. Naiur throws a javelin and the rat turns into a monstrous rat/girl hybrid. We fight, and Naiur beats her into a pulp. Raff turns into a rat and disappears into the river.    

The cultist's lair

We move on. From the description the rat children gave us, and what we can see, it seems there is a cavernous center room with two pathways circling around it. The pathways around the center chamber are moving downward. We fight several cultist on the way. A cultist pulls a lever, which releases a giant boulder that starts to roll down the pathway. We barely manage to escape the bouldery doom.   There are several rooms adjacent to the pathways. Several contain traps (magical chest that sucks Naiur inside it and a pit-trap-with-ooze-thing that dissolves Naiur a little). Rael manages to save Naiur both times. To make sure we don't have to deal with another boulder on the other pathway, we use the Immovable Rod to block it.   One of the rooms contains prison cells. They contain a satyr, named Cirius, who has an invisible dog companion (or so he says), named Rudolf. In the cell opposite him is an Owlbear, the 'Prince'. We are not sure if it is a prince trapped in an Owlbear body or whether it is just a regular (hungry hungry) Owlbear. Another cell contains Jean-Phillipe Lebas de Fenelon-Chaussy d'Edouart. He is from the kingdom of Fenelon to the south. Harvey detects he is, in fact, an undead creature! Jean-Phillipe denies this. We leave the prisoners in their cells for now.   Moving on, we have to fight our way through several cultists again. Another room we find contains a small shrine to the rat king, Totec. It has a tome, that speaks of gods. It is opened on the page about the Rat king. It has scriblings inside it that suggest that one of the chains was broken by manifesting the god of lies inside a shrine of the god of truth. It speaks of the three heirs, which leads to the second (and unfinished) chain.