Although five weeks had passed in our world, mere seconds had elapsed in Pete's campaign world when The Tuesday Knights resumed our campaign yesterday, still on the hunt for that elusive ogre that had been pestering the townsfolk of Dundraville.
We also suddenly realised that we did know the name of Simon's halfling bard - it's Harry Cobblethwaite... although I dread to think what song he will compose after this adventure.
The next room our brave heroes came to turned out to contain the ogre we were looking for - dressed in a hero harness and a thong, drunkenly collapsed across a table and snoring loudly.
We debated, in hushed tones, for ages about what to do next - ultimately coming back to the simple stratagem of hitting him until he fell over. It was - as all fights in The Fantasy Trip appear to be - a quite brutal fight, but somehow we miraculously came out of it relatively unscathed, while the ogre ended up unconscious.
Davian Battlebeard (Kevin), our feisty dwarf, was all for killing him straight away and after further debate, we agreed to look away while he caved in the beast's skull with his mighty mace.
I must confess to my wizard's eyes, he seemed rather small for a typical ogre and I'm rather worried that he might have been just a pup and the real ogre is still out there somewhere.
Anyway, I magically opened the ogre's giant treasure chest, which turned out to be full of silver coins, but still no clue as to where the villagers that the ogre had taken hostage (and we were supposed to rescue) were being kept.
And so we headed on, narrowly avoiding the ogre's pet wolf - thanks to our resident elf naturalist Veriel Whisperwind (Meredith) who calmed him down (and aims to return later with the idea of adopting it as her own pet) - and found several other abandoned rooms, and the way back out the cave mouth, but so sign of the kidnapped townsfolk.
Coming out of the cave system, we rested for a couple of hours, had some lunch and then returned to the concealed entrance through which we had first entered the caves, so we could check out a couple of passageways we hadn't explored before.
A tussle with a dire skunk and half-a-dozen poisonous centipedes later and we were still no closer to finding the kidnappees.
At my suggestion we then checked the eye sockets of the giant skull face carved into the hill (the mouth being the main cave entrance), but besides Harry getting into a scrape with a young vulture there were no clues.
Finally, and I can't remember who suggested this, we returned to the ogre's room and re-examined his storage alcove, finding foot prints we hadn't seen in our hurry before - foot prints that disappeared into the back wall.
One magical 'knock' spell later (thank you very much) and a hidden passagway was revealed, leading to a shaft, with a ladder to one side, descending down further into the earth.
To be continued...
