Dolmendays #2 - Tomb of the Goman Kings

“If you don’t like snakes, replace them with goats.”

- from page 1 of Tomb of the Serpent Kings, by Skerples

Previous Session: Into the Tumulheights

Evening on the 17th of Iggwyld, in the Fading of Spring

Our Troupe today features ...

• Glimmering-of-Sun’s-Turning-Tide, the bird-footed elf. Abandoned the eternal realms in favor of exploring Dolmenwood and beyond, relishing the flow of time and entropy. Has a few spell tomes of divination and discernment, of varying reliability.

• Gerund, the white-furred longhorn goman. Grew up at an orphanage outside Castle Brackenwold, and uses his goal of mapping the world (yes, the whole thing) to search for answers about his lost past. Can bend the wills of the weak-minded.

• Portobello Toadstool, the red-capped gnome. Helps those in need across the land, alongside his dependable bullfrog Funderburker. Carries a sturdy fishing rod and line. Gnomes in this world are 1 foot tall, making them very good at evading the big folk.

• Yegor, the bespectacled ratling. The sole survivor of his home warren’s tragic - and quite literal - downfall, which spurred him to seek out the power to save other ratlings from such calamitous fates. Uses a mystic eye spell tome for scouting.

(This is an open-table game, so players will drop in and out from session to session. We can usually explain it away in the moment, but for truly jarring absences I wrote this random table, which hasn’t helped at all.)

The four companions crept into the crypt. In this chamber - by far the largest one yet - the walls bore mosaics and frescoes of ancient goman lords at the height of their power. Against the North wall were three large coffins of gilded stone, and Gerund’s lantern revealed a dark passage to the South.

The orphaned longhorn hardly had time to take in the scene, though, before the grating of stone jolted everyone’s nerves. One coffin’s lid was shoved open from within, followed by a second, and their occupants emerged; two skeletal gomans, each with long twisting horns, and red flame sparking within their eye sockets. They both gave throatless screams and charged.

Everyone stood their ground and fought for their lives. Glimmering and Yegor were closest, and immediately engaged in a panicked melee with the undead. Neither Yegor’s nor Glimmering’s blades were effective against bone. Glimmering was gored by one skeleton’s horns, and hit back with their brass sword’s pommel. Yegor got knocked down and badly trampled by the other skeleton, but switched to his hammer (which wasn’t meant for this sort of ruckus) and bashed at his foe’s shins.

Gerund tried using his inherited powers with a commanding voice, but the mindless monsters were unfazed. As for Portobello, he reasoned that his slingstones would be of little help, so instead he cast his fishing rod’s line into the fray and managed to perfectly ensnare the legs of Glimmering’s assailant, which toppled to the floor when it next tried to lunge. The same stunt failed to work on the other skeleton. But with a few more well-placed pommel strikes and hammer blows, the skeletons were returned to proper death, leaving our tomb raiders winded and wounded. Glimmering’s gut was bleeding badly, and the other three volunteered torn bits of clothing as makeshift bandages. Yegor was bruised and battered, too, and so was his poor hammer; but the party was safe again, for the moment. The third, central coffin remained undisturbed.

Despite their wounds, they all agreed to press on through the Southern passageway. It led to the source of the humidity; a domed chamber eroded by water. The lantern revealed a figure sitting cross-legged on a pedestal, and everyone prepared for danger - until they saw it for what it was, a simple statue. But a sinister one. The statue’s head was a bulbous monstrosity, a giant egg bearing many lidded eyes, with the central eye peeled open in a piercing stare. The body was carved to be emaciated and deformed. On the pedestal were runes of Ancient Caprice that Gerund was able to roughly translate:

 

JALE GOD, DANCER IN DARKNESS

 

Illustration by Paul Gallagher

 

At the base of this dark shrine, water had split the stonework over many years to reveal a space beneath the statue, a passage that was once secret. It seemed to lead down into a deeper hallway. Curiosity was running wild, and Gerund dropped down first, reaching back up to help each of his companions descend further into the tomb. From beneath they could see the ruined mechanism that would have once allowed the statue to trundle aside and open the way.

Everybody noticed that the stonework down here was much better than up above, with walls carved evenly and floors free of gravel. Alcoves along the hallway held six statues of goman warriors that seemed to glare imperiously at our troupe as they passed.

You know how sometimes, in tales like these, the heroes will pass by a statue which then turns its head ominously to follow them? Spooky stuff. Anyway, that didn’t happen at all, but Glimmering’s elfin eyes did spot a secret passage behind an out-of-alignment statue. Squeezing past the stone guard led the party into a hidden guardroom littered with furnishings long since lost to rot. A wall rack held a pair of ancient halberds which were still decent enough to wield, so Gerund took one for himself, feeling some security in having a polearm. Glimmering was also plenty strong enough for one, but the gut wound made them less eager to lug a halberd around. Portobello was beginning to wonder if it was right to take anything from this place at all. His frog Funderburker wasn’t fazed.

Further down the hallway was a large octagonal chamber ringed with eight more glaring goman statues and seven stone doorways between them. The sunken floor of the chamber had a few centimeters of water, and towards the center the water went pitch black, revealing a pit beneath the ripples.

It took some tip-toeing about and brandishing of Gerund’s lantern for the party to get a good look at everything. They had entered from the West; to the East was the most ornate door, which was painted with a perplexing scene of goats raining down from the sky upon the world. Neat. The three doors to the South were unadorned, and one was already opened. But the three doors to the North each had an elegant brass placard above them, each embossed with a name in Ancient Caprice. From left to right, Gerund read them as:

KING XISOR THE GREEN, KING SPARAMUNTAR, and KING FRANBINZAR

Nobody had heard of these blokes before, but the spirit of discovery lingered. Yegor had spotted something glinting at him from the watery pit, as well as a possible movement down there. So Portobello employed his trusty fishing rod again, this time for its intended purpose. Sort of. After a few failed attempts and a bit of tugging, he reeled up a silver ring, different to the one they got from the tomb above; this one had an eyeball motif on it, similar to the central eye of the Jale God’s statue. Glimmering had a spell tome that could test these silver rings a bit, but decided to wait until later. It was pocketed, and the line cast again. Everyone else had their weapons readied while the gnome fished.

His next catch justified their caution, as Portobello reeled up a twitching and quite foul-smelling severed hand, still wrapped in burial silks. It was caught on the hook by the pinky, and was clearly trying to murder whatever it could get its undead grasp on. With all his might Portobello ran from the pool and slammed the hand against the wall, and Gerund pierced it with his halberd’s spear-tip. Glimmering gave it an additional stab with their brass sword, just to be certain the thing was dead.

They had all been standing with their backs to an unexplored corridor for some time, now, so Glimmering decided to investigate while Portobello made another attempt at fishing. They only had the one lantern (which was currently hanging from one of Gerund’s horns), but Glimmering was a moonchild, and could see about 5 feet in total darkness. That was enough to scout. The corridor led to a chamber that seemed to be full of clay goman warriors, similar to the ones in the upper tomb. Glimmering suspected that they were also full of poison, and rejoined the group swiftly.

Portobello’s third catch was too heavy for him, and the rest of the party aided in hauling it up. It was a thick golden chain, too thick to make a necklace. That didn’t stop Yegor from wearing it like one. It complemented his green spectacles, and made him look proper regal. He reckoned it was worth more than everything else the troupe owned combined.

“Are we absolutely sure,” Portobello asked, “that we should be robbing graves down here? Like, what if the spirits of the dead get even more restless than they already are, or something?”

“Ribbit,” offered Funderburker. No one else had qualms about claiming forgotten relics. In fact, Gerund was keen to investigate the three kings’ tombs, if only to learn more about them. What if he was their great-several-times-over-grandson?

They started by opening the door to King Franbinzar, and the lantern revealed things nobody liked seeing. A short hall led to a small chamber and coffin, both of which were tainted by some kind of black oozing sludge. It undulated in the faint lantern light. Unanimously, without further investigation, the party reclosed the door, because no thank you creepy slime room. Surely the tomb of Xisor the Green would prove better.

It didn’t. Gerund ventured down the hall first, stepped right on a pressure plate, and was almost immediately stricken by a blinding lightning bolt that split the air and deafened everyone. The goman staggered back into his teammate’s arms. Suddenly everything stank of burnt goat fur.

Gerund’s whole body felt fried by the electric shock; it would take him a very long time to fully recover from that. Yegor and Glimmering stayed with him while Portobello crept past the pressure plate and investigated the devious tomb. The lantern was placed on a ten-foot-pole to give the gnome a bit of light from down the hallway.

Behind the stone sarcophagus, a large metallic plate was hanging from a peg high up on the wall. The plate bore strange discolorations, as if it had been the origin of the lightning. Yet again, a fishing rod was the perfect solution, and the trap was safely disarmed, assuming it hadn’t already blown its only charge. Once it was hanging in front of him, Portobello could guess that the plate was electrum. Another treasure, but paid for in full by Gerund. After some strenuous work, the gnome was able to pry the coffin lid open just enough to see that it was empty inside. Perhaps that was for the best.

The troupe wrapped the plate in a rucksack to take with them, but lingered for one last act of curiosity. They gathered warily at the Eastern double doors, and once again admired its goat-pocalypse mural. Together they pulled it open. A frigid wind crept from the dark stairway beyond, chilling our brave adventurers to their cores. The stairs led down, down, deep into the echoing dark below.

Whatever may have lain in wait for them down there, none of our troupe wished to know. With the exception of Portobello and Funderburker, everyone was in pretty poor health, especially Gerund. They left the passageway open, packed what treasures they had found, and headed back to the surface world where their allies awaited them. This perilous venture had proven, once again, quadruply so, beyond any tangible possibility of speculation, that the only ratling graverobber to have ever been down here in any way whatsoever was assuredly, decidedly named Yegor. The ratling children’s father was still missing.

Next Session: Another foray into the dark below ...

36 Terrible Reasons for a Character's Jarring Absence

Coming up with contextual reasons on the fly for someone's character being absent when they don't attend a session works far, far better than this random table. Here it is anyway. It's a bit Dolmenwood-centric, too.

 

d6\d6   Reasons for a Character's Jarring Absence

1\1    They slipped through a mystic Fairy gateway.

1\2    Witches must've summoned them for a ritual.

1\3    Something turned them to stone! It'll pass.

1\4    They're hiding from the phantom taxman.

1\5    All this magic nonsense drove them off.

1\6    They're smoking pipeweed with an elf.

2\1    Shouldn't have eaten that mutton.

2\2    Shouldn't have eaten those mushrooms.

2\3    Shouldn't have eaten anything, apparently.

2\4    They were a figment of our imaginations.

2\5    They forgot about the Duke's summons.

2\6    They fell down a dire rabbit hole.

3\1     Ley lines swallowed them up.

3\2    They lagged behind and lost us.

3\3    They scouted ahead and lost us.

3\4    They felt crowded and ran off.

3\5    That mushroom insulted them!

3\6    A wicked woodgrue led them astray.

4\1    Their boots needed mending.

4\2    They lost their nerve and fled.

4\3    Watchers stole their body for a spell.

4\4    Some illusory treasure distracted them.

4\5    They heard a strange song, then vanished.

4\6    Something took them in the dark.

5\1    One of their backpack straps snapped!

5\2    They faked their death as a joke.

5\3    They stopped to smell cursed roses.

5\4    They must've just missed home.

5\5    A wizard clearly did it. Damn wizards.

5\6    Can't adventure with a hangnail.

6\1    Was it influenza?

6\2    Or mumps, perhaps?

6\3    Maybe worms?

6\4    Could have been hay fever.

6\5    Hopefully not dysentery.

6\6    They must've angered the gnomes.

 

The Delayed Gnome, by Uzag

 

Dolmendays #1 - Into the Tumulheights

This is Dolmendays, a bloggy retelling of sessions from a sandbox tabletop RPG campaign that sometimes, theoretically, will venture into some sort of Dolmenwood-ish place. See this blog’s first post for a better explanation of how the game works. It’s a story of scrappy, under-equipped adventurers trying very hard not to die whilst exploring their fairy-tale surroundings. Let’s begin!

Soay Sheep, by Tom Kilian

 

Midday on the 17th of Iggwyld, in the Fading of Spring

Today’s troupe consists of ...

• Portobello Toadstool, the gruff gnome nomad. Travels with his frog Funderburker to help those in need, as part of the Free Roaming Order of Gnomes. Stands 1-½ feet tall.

• Lisabeth Abernathy, the human occultist from Gaulandia. Used to knit clothes for children and pixies. Resents the Church for their eternal condemnation of witchcraft.

• Gerund, the longhorn goman cartographer. Ruled over all the other kids at the orphanage where he grew up. Searches for any information regarding his lost heritage.

• Wilford Brimley, the human doctor. Organized tributes for a local tree god. Sports an impressive moustache, as well as an eternal suspicion of everyone and everything.

• Yegor, the ratling quester. His warren was swallowed by the earth after his kin dug too deep. Seeks out whatever hidden power may save others of his kind from similar folly.

• Glimmering-of-Sun’s-Turning-Tide, the elven explorer. Left Hypnagogia after getting addicted to the passage of time. Has feathered hair, bird-like feet, and memories of Ynn.

(The party as a whole is equipped with scruffy armor of quilted linen or bark, a few meager weapons, several elementary spellbooks, one lantern, and packs full of junk that you’d likely find in a barn. And yes, the gnome absolutely has a pointy red hat.)

Sodden roads led this troupe of adventurers through the rain and into the Tumulheights, a stretch of grave-riddled hills slumbering to the South-East of Dolmenwood. Sparse woods provided no shelter, but a small roadside taphouse offered some; it was called Pook’s Way.

The proprietor of the rickety establishment, a red-furred goman named Tarridan Gresh, played a cello ‘neath his chin like an oversized violin. Also present were a few rowdy moss dwarfs at the bar, some nuns in the corner with flanged maces glinting beside their tea, and a pair of rain-soaked ratling children in red scarves who were drying themselves by the fire. Our adventuring party fit right in, and got to chatting with Tarridan about this stretch of countryside. They learned that these lands held tombs and cairns of the honored dead, human and goman alike. Tarridan briefly mistook the troupe for grave-robbers, as such scoundrels have apparently been flocking to the Tumulheights to claim the holy bones for profit. Everyone assured any within earshot that they weren’t affiliated with such groups. The armed nuns, according to Tarridan, were lichwards from the Abbey of Culderhill nearby, and were none too pleased with the grave-robbing.

While the others were talking, Portobello the gnome was approached by the ratling children, who asked if he could help them. Gnomes were known for helping others, after all. Portobello agreed to hear them out. They explained that their father was missing; he was a grave-robber, but an independent one, not affiliated with that bastard Bashwick and his goons. Normally their father, Paps, was a proper skilled robber, never plundered bones, and got back home in time for supper. But this time he’d been gone for nearly two days, and the siblings feared the worst. They dared not enter the tomb he’d delved into. It was an unexplored catacomb, only recently revealed to the surface by a rockslide. No other robbers had found it yet.

Portobello quietly brought the tale to everyone’s attention, and they all agreed to give this rescue mission a try. Gerund and Wilford were both suspicious of the ratling kids’ story, suspecting that this could all be a set up for some sort of devious trap. But they agreed all the same. The troupe departed so as to make it to the tomb before sundown. Lisabeth hung back for a moment to exchange pleasantries with the nuns - she stuck out her tongue and jeered, they spat on the floor and crossed themselves, standard stuff between aspiring witches and holy folk.

The rain was a miserable drizzle. Boots were getting filled with mud even before the party went off-road. They had taken the cartway East a mile or so, then cut North into the rugged hills for several miles. Along the way they spotted a camp in the distance, which seemed to be a band of humans dismantling a cairn to unearth ill-gotten treasures beneath, just as Tarridan had said. Our troupe kept the hill between them and the plunderers, and passed by unnoticed. Wilford was still certain that the ratling kids were leading everyone to their dooms.

Down in a rocky gulch, disguised behind some rearranged bushes and debris, was a hole in the living rock of the hillside. The party had arrived. A sizable hallway stretched into the darkness, tall enough for Gerund’s long horns to just barely scrape the ceiling. By the light of his oil lantern, he noted a few other scrapes similar to the ones he had just made; it looked like he hadn’t been the first longhorn goman to walk this hall. Down on the floor, Yegor looked for signs of a fellow ratling coming through this way, and found nothing but dust. By their best estimations, the party were the first people to set foot in this tunnel for the past age.

The ratling children (who were named Spidzle and Miggsy) claimed not to have actually seen their father Paps enter the tomb, but also claimed that he was very good at not being noticed. Gerund didn’t like the sound of any of this, but said nothing. Wilford didn’t like it either, and said so frankly and often. Yet the doctor was also the first one to march down the hallway in the name of exploration, and the whole troupe backed him up. The kids waited outside. “They’ll probably trap us all in this hellhole,” Wilford said with resignation.

[This session happened months ago, so any spoken words are definitely paraphrased and misremembered. But it’s close enough.]

The hallway had a few small chambers branching off of it, two on each side. The first two were similar; both contained a wooden coffin, and each coffin (after being carefully pried open by Gerund’s ten-foot pole) held a clay statue of an ancient goman warrior. The statue in the right chamber was split open at one of its feet, revealing it to be both hollow and contaminated with a dark acrid powder. The party avoided disturbing them further. The next two rooms held similar, slightly fancier coffins. One had a clay statue of some sort of longhorn goman scholar or sorcerer, which was left undisturbed. The final chamber’s coffin bore a brass placard on top, which read in ancient Caprice as ‘Sorcerer-King Mephistoph,’ as best as Gerund could translate it. The statue inside was of a longhorn king, and it bore a twisted silver ring on one of its clay fingers. When Lisabeth pried the ring free with their sickle, the statue broke open, releasing a plume of choking black vapor into the room. It was toxic, but Wilford was on hand with his spell tome of Cleanse Corruption at the ready, stopping the poison’s progress in its tracks. The ring was pocketed, and the other clay statues were left well alone.

The hallway ended with a large stone door, blocked with a stone crossbeam supported by two iron pegs. It had clearly not been opened since times of yore, so once again the party was left suspicious of Spidzle and Miggsy’s story. Their father had certainly never been through here. Before going back to give the ratling siblings a piece of his mind, though, Wilford stayed to help out Gerund with the stone crossbeam; Wilford was, surprisingly, swole as heck.

Lifting the beam slightly made the iron pegs click; never a good sound. They examined the hall, noting a few seams in the ceiling. Gerund and Wilford flattened themselves against the wall, the rest of the troupe stood back safely, and the beam was lifted all the way. Their cautious efforts were rewarded by just barely avoiding the giant stone hammer that came hurtling out of the ceiling. It grazed the stomachs of the two adventurers’ quilted gambesons before smashing the stone door to bits, ruining it forever. The impact resonated down the hallway, and a waft of cold humid air coiled free from the dark chamber beyond. The rubble of the door lay at their feet.

This proved, thrice over, without a shred of doubt, that Paps the ratling grave-robber had never ever come this way, not even a little bit. So Wilford and Lisabeth went back to have a word with the children. Meanwhile, Gerund, Glimmering, Yegor, and Portobello, armed with a single lantern and four curious minds, stepped into the unsealed tomb.

Next session: The Tomb of the Serpent Goman Kings

[Parting notes: For curious GMs out there, and decidedly NOT for curious players (you know who you are!) here's a link to the Tumulheights for your own adventures! In this campaign I moved it further south.

 

Also, we play this game on Discord, and while I’m caught up juggling PDFs, everyone else has a chance to flex their meme-crafting in the chat. A few of those memes might leak into this blog via imgur albums, sometimes. We take all of this very seriously.]

Prologue in the Gardens of Ynn (part 2 of 2)

(Continued from part 1)

Haunted House, by Ulla Thynell

Hothouses beneath Bird Nests

Amidst a copse of trees sagging under the weight of hundreds of empty bird nests, our troupe came upon three multi-storied glass houses. They were all overgrown with vines and lichen beds, and filled with thriving flora of many different kinds. Two were boarded over, but one two-story house was accessible - after Eddie had pried the door off its hinges with his claymore. Through the rusted door-frame the troupe discovered a warm room full of ornamental golden bird cages, each the size of a full-grown person’s torso. The cages hung from the ceiling like glittering prizes, absorbing the attention of the troupe - right up until they noticed the skeletons on the floor. Human skeletons, this time, wrapped in vines and root systems that bound every joint and vertebra.

At the back of the hothouse was an iron stairway spiraling up to the second floor; Eddie trekked through the bones and climbed it, finding a room full of old tables. An open window looked out from the second floor over the front doorway. Downstairs, Lisabeth and John began detaching the golden cages from their hooks. If they could get enough of these back to the relative civility of Prigwort, they’d be rich overnight. Lisabeth could finally afford a proper bath. Eddie could ditch his job as a fletcher. It was worth any risk.

Glimmering kept watch of the room from just outside the door, and consequently was the first to notice the skeletons move.

The bones did not animate on their own. They were puppeteered by the vines and roots that covered them, making a mockery of human locomotion. Lisabeth and John dove through the door to join Glimmering outside, and the three of them backed up to let the plant-skeletons spill out of the hothouse. Eddie took up a position at the window above with his arbalest. Everyone set their weapons at the ready. The plant-skeletons charged out of the hothouse in silence.

Everyone quickly noticed that the cores of these ambulatory plants were kept within the rib cages, and focused their attacks there. John’s pike found its way through one, but he was mauled in the process. Glimmering was clawed too, and their bronze sword didn’t fare well against the coiled vines and bones. Lisabeth rolled around her attackers and turned her hatchet backwards to hammer the plant-skeletons with the blunt end, crushing their foundational bones and leaving them vulnerable to her sickle. And the two bolts that Eddie was able to fire each found their mark, obliterating the foes they struck. Eddie had always been better at shooting than fletching; these bolts had been made by his master, and they flew true. After a brutal scrap, the bones were broken and the creepvines were cleaved. Healing herbs gathered previously saved both John and Glimmering from bleeding to death. The garden was quiet once more.

Which meant that looting could be resumed. Eddie kept his post at the window, Glimmering kept watch outside, and John and Lisabeth resumed carrying out cage after glorious golden cage, stacking them in the fallen leaves outside the hothouse. It was estimated that the troupe could drag along up to ten of these things, with difficulty. John wove a rope through the upper bars of all ten to prepare them for transport. It was time to head back to Dolmenwood.

While the others worked, Eddie guarded the second-story window, which gave him a vantage point to spot some movement. A shadow, faint and distorted, was drifting across the leaves and vacant nests  of the nearby trees. He traced it upwards, and gazed upon yet another malformed product of the garden. A giant, floating, glistening, iridescent, slimy jellyfish. It drifted through the air weightlessly, its tendrils slick with mucous. Eddie didn’t need to deliberate or call out a warning; one arbalest bolt was all the response that was required.

The bolt zipped through the jellyfish’s center, spewing translucent guts out the back. As if woken up from a dream, the jellyfish ceased floating instantly and tumbled down, landing directly on Glimmering. The elf was covered head to toe in stinging tendrils and gelatinous viscera, all of which burned like fire.

Everyone helped Glimmering remove as much of the stinging mess as possible (without getting any on themselves, of course) and made quick work of the rest of their golden cage-wrangling. Eddie descended, apologized to a remarkably composed (if welt-covered) Glimmering, and the troupe made ready to return home, each shouldering the rope in single file. The cages clanged and bashed against one another as they were dragged through the grass, but the rope held.

As they backtracked into the rose bushes, though, the noise attracted unwanted attention. The troupe halted as soon as they spotted the two creatures, and sap-coated weapons were readied once again. These creatures were birds of fabulous plumage, bursting over with lavish color and elegance. Their claws were larger than Glimmering’s, proper talons meant to maim and crush. And their beaks, hooked and blood-stained, were wicked beyond compare. If the common peafowl had taken a page from the cassowary's playbook and then started hunting antelope, they still would have been outclassed in every way by the Ynnian peahawk.

Facing what amounted to dinosaurs with fashion sense, John Rhys-Davies did the only sensible thing: he struck up a friendly conversation with them. He’d always had a knack for bird-speech, after all. The two peahawks were startled at first, but proved amenable enough to negotiate with. John promised them that a fine kill was up ahead, just waiting for something to come by and eat it. Humans and elves were far too stringy for their palates, after all - and moss dwarfs were practically salad! The peahawks agreed with his reasoning, and got a hungry glint in their eye. They began following the troupe to this supposed kill, giving the clanging bird cages a wide berth.

Back to the Fountain Court with Those Idiots’ Corpses

Emerging from the rose-bush rows, Eddie (currently at the front end of the rope) nearly stepped on a turtle. Everyone halted. This turtle looked poorly, as if its shell had been partially crushed. And from the large split near the shell’s peak, a gnarled little bonsai tree sprouted, nearly taller than the turtle that bore it.

(GM’s note: I misremembered the bonsai turtle’s details mid-game. According to the bestiary description, the shell was supposed to be intact and bowl-shaped, and the turtle was supposed to be as big as a cart! These things happen when you skim text during a long session.)

The bonsai turtle looked up with weeping little eyes, and croaked loudly at Eddie. At least, that’s how he experienced it; he was a burg-soul through and through, and talking animals never made sense to him. But the others heard the turtle perfectly well, as it chided their careless manner. “Have you no respect for those around you?” it wheezed, continuing to trundle past. “Honestly, you meet the worst sorts of people these days ... ” The troupe gave a few apologies and condolences, which didn’t seem to register. A piercing shriek from a peahawk, however, did.

With trembling horror, the little reptile spotted what was following the troupe. The peahawks clawed at the grass in anticipation. “Oh, mercy, please, nooooooo!” screamed the turtle. Every fiber of its broken body propelled it towards the hedges as fast as it could manage, and it flopped over the pathway's edge and into the bushes. The peahawks dove after it, ramming their long necks under the hedge and shredding branches with their claws. Everyone continued hauling their cages as fast as possible, leaving behind the fountain and its corpses before the peahawks could realize that bonsai turtles and rotting adventurers made for a poor supper.

(If only the turtle had been properly giant, it could have survived!)

Back to the Burned Shadow Theater

Their hands were chafing against the rope, and the clattering of the cages was distressingly obvious. But these cages were going to give our troupe the good life. They couldn’t abandon that.

As they passed the shadow amphitheater, the hole left in the hedges by those white apes allowed a familiar horror to wander in; seven more plant-skeletons, stepping shakily across the charred wreckage. There was nowhere to hide. A fight broke out.

Luck was fully on the troupe’s side this time, and they knew what weapons would damage these fiends best. Most of the plant-skeletons went down swiftly. But as Eddie reloaded his arbalest to eliminate the final one, his shadow finally found the perfect moment to betray him. It tore its feet from his, and broke free across the stone pavement of the amphitheater, wheeling and prancing in wicked delight. Eddie grew pale, having just lost a valuable chunk of his soul. The shadow vanished, outpacing the troupe on its way back to the door, to Dolmenwood, to its new un-life as a free-roaming specter of doom. This particular troupe would never see that particular Shadow again.

The last vine monstrosity was dispatched by the others, and they all took a short breather to ensure everyone was ready to go on. While his mind was marred and his spirit splintered, Eddie’s arms were still able to haul the troupe’s golden prizes. They carried on clanging towards home. This time, the hidden basket with the pheasant was left undisturbed.

Back to the Burned Herb Garden

There were no more unburnt herbs left to gather, and even if there had been, the troupe had bigger, angrier things to worry about. A swarm of large bumblebees, colored reddish-brown like rust, had been rousted from their hidden hive by the clanging of the cages. But safety was close at hand, and our troupe put every speck of might they had into hauling across the burned garden, with their ten roped treasures getting battered and bashed with each bump in the path. The bumblebees were far behind, but the meandering hedge paths did little to slow them down.

Back to the Vine Trellises

The source of the delicious blue fruits was no longer vacant. A marble statue of a sidhe stood beneath the trellises, gazing solemnly at the fruit while singing a piercing operatic melody. The living stone turned to face our noisy and thoroughly exhausted troupe, and its song grew even more ear-splitting than before. It seemed displeased with the intrusion. Whether or not it was hostile was unclear.

John produced the ornate music box that he had found before, and began cranking it to life. The discordant and atonal notes of the box broke the statue’s composure, and its face contorted into a snarl of chiseled contempt. It was certainly hostile now. John kept playing the box; if this was a fight, might as well annoy the enemy. Lisabeth turned her trusty hatchet backwards once more to bash apart the stone. Glimmering was still covered in welts from the giant jellyfish, and stayed back. And Eddie, having lost his shadow, his lunch, and his fear of death, turned his claymore around to hold it by the blade like a club. Backed up by John’s music box, Eddie and Lisabeth dodged past swinging marble fists and brought their weapons down on the statue’s leg, which fractured and broke in two. The statue tumbled to the ground.

Now it couldn’t pursue them. Weapons and music boxes were stowed, the rope was taken up again, and our troupe of four unlikely explorers started on the final leg of their returned journey, leaving the shattered statue to wail amidst the trellises.

And then the bees caught up to them.

Back to the Fountain Court and the Doorway Home

The troupe sprinted, badly denting their cages in the process, but the piglet-sized rust bees were swarming at their rear. While the cages seemed to be immune to the rust bees’ influence, the same could not be said for the our troupe’s metal gear. The insects corroded the blade and chainmail of Eddie, and the heater shield of John Rhys-Davies.

Rather than bother trying to fight back, everyone just put their all into hauling on the rope. The door in the wall was still wide open, the dark rainstorm still raging on the other side. With bees rusting their gear and stinging their hides, our troupe charged through the doorway, and the golden cages crashed along behind them, tumbling into the thick mud of the forest roadway.

Lisabeth scrambled back to the door in the tree and slammed it shut. The rust bumblebees that made it through didn’t like the rain one bit, and quickly scattered through the dripping treetops in confusion at their new environment. The troupe caught their breath, lungs burning, legs shaking, skin swelling from toxic bee-stings. They were barely alive. That was enough.

It would take many long hours of marching and shivering for our worn-out adventurers to drag those dented golden cages through the mud all the way back to Prigwort. But even as damaged as they were, the reclaimed gilding of the cages would be enough to set these four up for a good while. Lisabeth Sunderman would finally get to visit a proper bath house and move up in society. John Rhys-Davies would be able to give up his thieving ways, at least for a bit. Eddie would be able to strike out into the world on his own terms, though his lack of a shadow would always haunt him.

As for Glimmering-of-Sun’s-Turning-Tide, well ... elves don’t age, you see. For you and I, time flows like an ever-quickening stream. But for an elf time rushes past like a waterfall, each droplet a day or year or century. The thrill of Glimmering’s short time in Ynn would never be forgotten entirely, but it would fade. They had developed a taste for the ephemeral moments of adventure, those fleeting bursts of wonderment and peril. The eternal land of Hypnagogia was stagnant; this mortal world, and all the worlds it led to, were full of possibilities.

Maybe it would be a few years, maybe fifty. But some time later, the avian elf called Glimmering would once again find themselves trudging down a muddy road in Brackenwold, in the company of a troupe of mortals, seeking out foolhardy adventure and new discoveries.

(Continued in Dolmendays #1)

The Gardens of Ynn was written by Emmy Allen.

The Ynn Generator I used was made by David Schirduan.

During the session, we listened to a bunch of music from the soundtrack for Hollow Knight composed by Christopher Larkin, which can be listened to in long unbroken videos here.