Chapter Ten: The Hunt For Margesh Blackblood, The Conclusion...

Captured: Margesh Blackblood

With the ogres dead, our heroes quickly found the hidden room where their quarry - the elusive bandit leader Margesh Blackblood - was hiding.

The charming outlaw endeavoured to open negotiations, but the fiery-tempered dwarf Davian Battlebeard was having none of it and attacked, backed up by the magical webs of young wizard-in-training Marigold Weaver. Blackblood shrugged off a couple of Marigold's treacherous webs and gave a dazzling demonstration of his swordsmanship, landing a powerful blow on Davian while almost simultaneously disarming the sneaky Imogen (whose twin daggers of death had come into play).

Harry the halfling bard provided musical support, his tune bolstering the party's morale.

He was, however, soon overpowered and bound in ropes by our canny heroes. Marigold used her staff to bludgeon Margesh unconscious. He was then stripped of his possessions and secured across the back of the group's mule, Charles.

Kirchin, the only skilled swordsman in the group, took possession of Margesh's fabled Sword Of Aquin (for safekeeping), before the group headed off back through the forest towards Horst, a village they planned to avoid because it was a hideout for Margesh's band of ruffians, on their route back to Bendwyn.

As they approached the tree with the word Croatoan carved on it, that marked the start of the narrow trail back towards the "hellmouth" crypt they had explored days earlier, they discovered three corpses across the path - two men (no good ruffians, by the look of it) and a bound-and-gagged peasant woman.

A trail of blood led away from the site along the same path the party was taking, so they investigated only to find themselves back at the murder site. Although this time the woman's corpse had disappeared.

Perplexed, they carried on and again found themselves back at the murder site, although this time the woman's corpse had returned and one of the dead thugs now looked suspiciously like Kirchin!

Pressing on, our heroes found themselves once more approaching the murder site - only this time the murder seemed to be in progress and the path was blocked by a gigantic bear of a man, with bulging eyes and a frothing mouth, swinging an enormous axe.

Kirchin fired an arrow at the berserker, alerting him to the party's presence and he charged them. Marigold zapped him with a magical web, but he kept charging, head-down, like a bull and went crashing into the party.

Kirchin had dropped his bow and drawn the Sword of Aquin and in the ensuing tussle he decapitated the insane murderer.

Davian recognised the dead man as one of the shady folk he had seen the other week in Skarg's bar, back in Bendwyn, and Imogen realised that's where she knew the other two dead men from. The woman's identity remained a mystery.

Harry and Marigold went through the dead man's backpack, finding a stash of adventuring equipment, which the group divvied up, and a coin purse that contained - as well as cash - a crumpled note that Marigold read out aloud:

"to those of you who have killed Garig, thank you. I extend my offer to you as I did to him, bring me a woman of virtue and I will reward you with magic"

Although the party had already suspected there was some powerful magic at work here, this confirmed it and Margesh identified the mark at the end of the note as the sign of the legendary "witch of the forest", although he thought she operated in the far south of the Huldre Forest, beyond the Bright River.

It took the group some time, and a diversion to the tomb of Viktor Volkov, to realise they had somehow broken the magic spell - although it wasn't until they got home to Bendwyn and were telling the tale of their adventures that someone recognised Garig as the berserker from his description.

The party made their way out of the forest, heading to Dundraville, where they were warmly welcomed and put up for the night, before finally making it home to Bendwyn.

Sir Browyrd, the duke's agent, had left a message that a runner should be spent to Dranning upon our heroes return with the captured bandit.

Margesh was taken into custody by guard-sergeant Max Beerfoam and locked up in the town watch house, leaving our heroes to catch their breaths, celebrate their triumph and try to return to their normal lives.

CAST:

• Kirchin (Pete)
• Davian (Kevin)
• Harry (Simon)
• Imogen (Meredith)
• Marigold (Clare)

Chapter Nine: The Vault Of Viktor Volkov (aka The Hunt For Margesh Blackblood, part three)

A Glimpse Of Hell? Inside the metal coffin was a blackness blacker than this...

Continuing their exploration of the Vault Of Viktor Volkov, the party debated whether to open the door with the hellish engravings on or head through the plain door across the way from the secret corridor where they found the silver ingots.

They opted to bypass the engraved door for now, taking the clear symbolism as a major warning of a possible Hellgate!

Through the other door, and over another pit trap that Harry spotted, they came upon a room with an altar to Volkov's ancestors. While examining this room they could hear heavy crashing sounds from back in the main corridor - the living statues were trying to climb out of the pit they had been pushed into.

An examination of the pillars in the room revealed crowns that acted as switches and opened a panel in the top of the altar, revealing three copper tubes, sealed with iron plugs and wax. Kirchin pocked these, but left a small (two inch long) drinking horn they discovered hanging on the side of the altar.

Heading back to the main corridor, Imogen scouted ahead and narrowly avoided being grabbed by the animated statues that had made their way out of the pit trap and were blocking the doorway back into the main passage.

Imogen: She may look sweet - but she's a demon
with her paired daggers

A fight erupted in the narrow passage with Kirchin wielding Volkov's sword and Davian swinging his mace. Marigold was behind them, using her magical healing when one got hit by a stone golem. Once Kirchin reduced the first statue to dust, Imogen slipped round the side and started with her trademark double-dagger stabby-stabby routine.

Harry has tried to sing a rousing ditty to boost group morale, but had instead choked on the dust in the air and lost his voice for the duration of the battle.

With three attackers on it, the second statue soon crumbled as well.

Buoyed up by their triumph, they decided to check behind the "Hellgate door" and found a large pillared room with a metallic coffin at its centre, locked by half-dozen padlocks. Through a small side door they found a room with a magically locked chest that they were unable to open or move.

After much discussion, Imogen picked the six locks and the coffin was cautiously opened. When Kirchin looked in he saw only a pool of impossible blackness and before anything else could happen, the party slammed the coffin back shut and relocked the padlocks.They were (rightly?) terrified of whatever the coffin contained and had no desire to hang around and find out what it was...

Taking a silver ingot each from their earlier treasure find, and four to load on Charlie the mule, who was patiently waiting for them outside the dungeon, chewing on his bag of carrots, the adventurers headed back to Horst.

At the village they were greeted by Jerron, lieutenant of the infamous bandit-prince Margesh Blackblood. Kirchin handed over the map of the vault he had made, along with the four silver ingots and a "detailed" description of what they had found - including a dire warning of an "otherworldly portal to Hell".

Jerron: The party
don't trust him...

Jerron was pleased with the information and gave Kirchin directions to a ruined tower on the banks of The Bright River where he should be able to meet up with Margesh Blackblood. He gave Kirchin some words of introduction and a password: Magpie.

Our heroes immediately set off - feeling quite paranoid about staying in Horst - and made camp on the way to the Bright River. They were convinced that Jerron was setting them up and they were heading into some kind of ambush.

However, after a lengthy discussion at their camp site they agreed they were pursuing Margesh out of civil duty - rather than for any financial reward (as they had already found treasure far exceeding the bounty being offered by Sir Browyrd, The Sheriff Of Dranning).

The next day they party continued on and as they approached the ruined tower saw the corpse of a mauled horse and heard the sounds of battle emerging from the stairwell leading beneath the tower.

Cautiously surveying the brutal signs of a bloody battle they came upon a pair of ogres - thankfully one at a time - and felled them reasonably swiftly.

There were a lot of dead bandits here and signs that one of the ogres had been pounding on a wall for some reason.

To be continued...

CAST:

• Kirchin (Pete)
• Davian (Kevin)
• Harry (Pete - in Simon's absence)
• Imogen (Meredith)
• Marigold (Clare)

Chapter Eight: The Vault Of Viktor Volkov (aka The Hunt For Margesh Blackblood, part two)

In This Week's Thrilling Episode: Our Heroes Face A Pair Of Animated Stone Statues...

[After an extended break, gaming resumed for the Tuesday Knights yesterday with the return of Clare to our table for the first time since the birth of baby Bettany]

Picking up from the end of the last session, Pete's character, Kirchin the healer, had gained the confidence of Jerron, Margesh's number two, who offered him a chance to 'prove himself' by running a little job for the gang.

Jerron told him of a little "honeypot" his men had found in the Huldre Forest but hadn't had time to explore. He gave Kirchin directions to the old mausoleum and suggested he get a group of friends to help him haul out any treasure they found there.

The loot would be split 50/50 with Jerron, then Jerron would introduce him to Margesh who would have the final say over whether he could join the gang.

When Kirchin met up with his travelling companions - Harry Cobblethwaite (Simon), Davian Battlebeard (Kevin) and Imogen (Meredith) - to tell them about the job, he discovered they had found Imogen's friend Marigold Meaver (Clare), assistant to their old pal, Peter Entwhistle, the wizard of Bendwyn.

Following the directions they had been given, the group entered the forest and soon became engulfed in a strange smelling mist which stirred vivid memories in most of them (Kirchin recalled an incident from his time with the army, Davian a flooding incident from his days as a young miner, Harry remembered the time he turned his back on his father to follow his musical dreams and Marigold recovered a repressed memory about Syrius, the sage of Horst).

[By improvising these stories at the drop of a hat, the players earned 'cards' - thank you, Paizo for the Plot Twist: Flashbacks cards - that gave them a one-off bonus for use at a later time of their choosing]

Before reaching the entrance to the "dungeon", the group had a passive encounter with a wandering brown bear and came upon a tree with strange carvings on that only Marigold could read.

She couldn't quite make out all the letters, but Harry had a vague idea that it might be a word from an old song.

Finally arriving at the door of the mausoleum, the adventurers cautiously entered, discovering - and disarming - a number of traps before finding themselves in a tomb being attacked by a pair of animated statues. Incredibly - using teamwork [and a bit of the 'reality-altering' bonus gained from the Flashback cards] - they managed to push both the statues back into a pit and contain them there.

The party then opened the sarcophagus and found a skeleton clutching a shiny sword, which Kirchin went to pick up and was zapped with the memories of its former owner: a virtuous paladin called Viktor Volkov, who had been part of a team responsible for sealing a gateway to Hell.

Exploring further into the tomb the group found a closed door with fanciful engravings depicting horned demons carrying human souls down to Hell (seeing a theme here our heroes decided to shy away from that door for the moment), but while checking another section of the corridor the team of Harry and Imogen (the group's two "thieves") discovered a concealed doorway.

Behind this door was a short passage with a strange chest in it. The heavy chest - which turned out to be made of silver - had three movable handles on top. Harry realised it was trapped and although the trap kept resetting after he "defused" it, he methodically ran through all the combinations before Imogen pointed out there was a concealed keyhole on the back of the chest.

Harry picked the lock and the team were delighted to find it full of silver ingots.

To be continued...

Marigold's Story...

Marigold Weaver

Daughter of Bendwyn's weaver, Dennis, Marigold was apprenticed to town wizard Peter Entwhistle at a young age.

While this basically amounted to a lot of skivvying and looking after Peter and Betty's young children (Logan and Kitty), he did teach her a couple of useful healing spells.

She has also snuck a look in some of Peter's books and taught herself the "webbing" spell.

Recently while cleaning up for Peter, the teenager broke one of his precious glass alembics, and so he sent her to Horst to pick up a replacement from the alchemist Syrius.

It took her three days to reach the town, but unfortunately no sooner had she collected it from Syrius than she dropped that as well.

Now convinced both the wizard and alchemist will be furious with her she doesn't know what to do, but luckily she has spotted her friend from the town, Imogen (the potter's adopted daughter) and Bendwyn's smith, the dwarf Davian Battlebeard, in Horst.

Chapter Seven: The Hunt For Margesh Blackblood (part one)

Skarg The Half-Orc Was Not A Welcoming Host...

Our heroes had learned of the bounty on the cad Margesh Blackblood and that he had ambushed the Sheriff's tax collectors outside the town of Trews.

Kirchin (Pete's character) and Harry went off to purchase supplies for the cross-country journey, but Imogen (Meredith's character) spotted a shady contact from her youth, a skinny lad called Cooper, looking shifty and heading towards the out-of-town dive known as Skarg's - after its half-orc owner.

Cooper

Imogen and Davian (Kevin's character) weren't exactly welcomed in Skarg's, with the foul-tempered half-orc showing them the door and his loaded crossbow.

Naturally a brawl broke out at the entrance to the drinking establishment with Davian and Skarg trading blows and wrestling, while Imogen slipped back inside and raced up to the roof to find Cooper. Too late, he had already released a messenger pigeon - but Imogen gave him a sound beating and got him to confess it was going to the town of Horst.

Eventually, Davian managed to clock Skarg on the back of the head with his mace, bringing the half-orc to his knees, but then he and Imogen left to meet up with Kirchin and Harry. However, Davian was heard to mutter threats about "coming back and burning the place down". Apparently he wasn't happy to have a crossbow pointed at his face in "his" town.

Even though the reward for the capture of Margesh maxed out at about 250 silver coins, Kirchin had spent 600 silver on equipment for the whole party and got them a donkey - called Charles - to carry the extra gear.

Imogen explained why they should start their investigation in Horst and so that's the direction they set off.

It was a three-day journey, but on the first night they stopped off at Dundraville, where they were welcomed as returning heroes, and the evening passed amidst a cloud of fine food, drink and conversation (the main topic being local politics and Margesh Blackblood, indolent noble-turned-self-proclaimed-people's-champion).

Horst (map by Dyson Logos)

Eventually our heroes arrived at Horst and found the house that Cooper described. By the sound of it there was a riotous party going on inside and so eventually the group decided to try and infiltrate this, as they'd heard tell that Margesh had 20 or 30 men in his gang and so a frontal assault was definitely off the cards.

Harry climbed onto the roof, where he spied a drunken guard snoozing against a pigeon coop. He seemed to be cradling a dead pigeon and Harry tried to extract the bird from the drunk man's grasp. The drunk stirred, as though waking, and Harry sung him a halfling lullaby, sending him back to sleep.

The pigeon still had its message bag attached to its foot and Harry carefully pulled out the fragile message - a coded string of symbols - and then returned it to the message bag, before he scuttled back down to the ground and drew out the message he had seen for the others to try and translate.

The "cryptic message"

[As a brief aside, because I don't think it'll be that important now. I scribbled out Cooper's coded message on a tiny sliver of toilet paper. And when Pete - as Harry - was looking at it, and memorising it, he was looking at the back of the paper. So the message he then drew out for the rest of the paper was backwards!]

Davian, bearing a cask of beer, and Harry then effectively gatecrashed the gang's celebrations while Kirchin and Imogen snuck round the back of the house.

The drunk bandits were conned into thinking that the dwarf Davian and halfling bard, Harry, were "the entertainment" - although things almost turned nasty when our heroes found themselves surrounded in a backroom of the gang's hideout.

There was loud, repeated, chants of "Dance, monkeys, dance!"

While Harry provided the musical accompaniment, Davian was made to dance on the table (he didn't dance well and ended up falling off. One of the bandits tried to give him a kicking but was too drunk to connect).

Meanwhile Kirchin and Imogen had set fire to the back of the house - as a distraction - and retreated to a safe distance to see who came out.

Jerron

It was quite obvious that inside a fellow named Jerron was calling the shots and when the fire was spotted he ordered everyone out, although one gang member disappeared through a different door.

Harry and Davian slipped out with the gang (Harry, unnoticed, lifting a tube of coloured liquid from Jerron's belt). Except for Jerron and another, the assorted thugs went round to the back of the house to try and put the fire out - with the help of their neighbours who had spotted the burning building.

The drunk guard on the roof had been awoken by the fire and in his panic ran off the roof, crashing into the street and breaking his neck!

The gangster talking to Jerron went back into the burning house, returned a few minutes later and spoke to Jerron again before they both went back in and returned with the missing gang member - who had apparently, somehow, broken his leg really badly and looked like he was at death's door.

Kirchin was already tending to the guy who had jumped off the roof when Jerron asked him if he was healer, then ordered him to help his colleague.

The physicker - telling Jerron his name was 'Charlie' - bound up the broken leg and got chatting with Jerron, who said he could always do with someone with Kirchin's skills in his gang and was he interested?

To be continued...