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!
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| Soay Sheep, by Tom Kilian |
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.]
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