#69 - The Forger's Lair

As told by Magnus of the Island of Seren.

Crammed spaces.  I am coming to hate them.

We were in a halfling's basement, kicking our way into a room guarded by a warforged and there was NO way I could swing my mace in there.  Hopefully, the next room would be built a bit bigger.  The party spilled out into a really nicely furnished room, tea set and all.  A handful couple of kobolds and the warforged were ready to get physical with us.

I banged the warforged hard, but this one cheated and sprayed and spurted substances at us. Some kind of ink even blinded Cypher. But as we tore into the warforged and the kobolds and and started to win, the warforged slid over to a painting of a city on the wal....and then stepped inside it.  I could see him in there…more magic.  It wasn’t long before some of the party let us know that there was a magic word to get into the painting. Kard must have heard it first. He stepped right into the painting after the warforged.

Clarion, too, then said the word very clearly—“Ristil” or thereabouts—and put his hand through the painting.  I put my hand on his shoulder and tried to put my hand in. No good, I had to say the watchword myself.

Clarion stepped in. I said the word finally, and stepped in. It was a funny feeling, but not a bad one.  I emerged in a slighter larger, less furnished room that looked like a barracks. Inside were also Kard and Clarion and some halflings and the fleeing warforged.  We killed them all—almost. And Kard got stabbed repeatedly by the halflings. It was strange! I'm more accustomed to seeing pooling blood beneath my own body, not my ally's. We did realize that without some help, we couldn’t use all the paintings—and there was another in this room. I tried to knock one of the halflings out and Kard used a “hold person” spell on him.

Cypher joined us. We spent a long time doing a bad job of interrogating our prisoner. A bad job. He negotiated with us and then gave us the watchwords for activating the magic paintings—one for passing through alone, one for looking through like a window, and one for letting in a larger group. We asked him where the forger was—the one whose lair this was—and the halfling told us it was the painting in the first room.

We headed back into the first room. We let the one prisoner go. We dragged the warforged back into the first room, since Cypher wanted his goo-spraying arm weapon. Acid, ink, grease, stuff like that. Cypher will likely mount it on his head.

After another long talk, we moved into the painting of the dark wasteland—the halfling said it was a paint of Dolurrh, the Realm of the Dead—the way we were told to go. Once we entered, we found it to be very different than the other rooms. It was like a grave or something, soft spongy ground, covered with mist and under that, insects.  At the end were two large root-like trees and a door. The misty floor felt strange and I heard some kind of commotion among my allies as I walked through it towards the opposite door. Then the floor seemed to open up directly in front of me. I didn’t fall, but something was charging up out of the misty pit in front of me.

The halfling prisoner had sent us to a trap.

And why shouldn’t he?