Things in the Basement

These will be explained later...

Ehlessa's Narrative
Marion skips gleefully down the stairs, even though they are covered with a layer of slippery black mildew. The rest of us follow rather more gingerly. Destiny picks the frozen lock of a large door at the bottom, and we file through.

We enter a large square basement hall. The room is bare, and every surface is covered in frost. Marion spots an area of flagstones that is more snowy white than the rest, and investigates. She lifts a large flagstone quite easily - it is less thick than the others and has a ring set into it. Underneath is a hidden well, an internal water supply. Falling into the icy waters beneath would not be much fun.

As we look around the room, we see three doors. Also, the entire room is covered in expensive tiling, depicting motifs of timepieces repeated over and over: sundials, hourglasses, water clocks - you name it. Whoever lived here had a real thing about time.

One of the rooms turns out to be the larder, well stocked with various carcasses, some of which might still even be edible - frozen food, anyone? There is also a substantial wine storage rack, full of bottles. Destiny says, "The red will be spoiled, but the white could be salvageable. It looks like a good vintage!" Sure enough there are around thirty bottles of what we are hoping will be very good quality, but we will have to leave those for now.

The second door leads to some sort of study, with bookshelves, alchemical apparatus and a large trough against one wall, which is now full of mud that glows ever so slightly. There is also a four-armed statue in the centre of the room, and we can barely make out the lines of a compartment in its plinth. Clearly, there is some sort of mechanism here - we will just have to work out how the arms are moved properly to open the thing. Before doing so, however, we decide to have a look at the third room.

This is where it all gets even stranger. Against one wall is a small chest, but what really dominates the room is a mirror that takes up the entirety of a wall. It is of exquisite workmanship, and is supported by a marble figure of a warrior to either side. As I look at it, though, I see my reflection start from childhood and then work its way up to old age. I shake my head to clear my vision - am I seeing things? I then catch a glimpse of an old man wearing scholar's robes, turning four long ornate keys covered in runes over and over in his hands. He has a pleased, almost gloating expression on his face, and is saying something. This sight vanishes.

The others have seen something similar. Destiny and Sir Blanque both say that the image was speaking in Low Melnibonean, the language of the educated, and that he looks like the vision of the body we saw upstairs. They both concentrate, and successfully, it seems, work out from his lips what he is saying: "The keys to time!"

Sir Blanque tries to pick the lock of the chest, but fortunately for him, he fails. Marion hears a distinct click, and there is a little yellowed spot on the lock pick. She says, "Lucky for you! If that had been your hand..." None of  us is willing to try their hand, so I just use force; I insert the tip of my scimitar and  give it a good wrench. Something goes ping and the tip of a needle breaks against the blade and goes hurtling across the room. I then force open the chest; I'm fast losing patience with subtlety.

Inside is a superior quality dagger, which Marion appropriates. There is also a matched set of an ornate, gold and silver-inlaid moondial and sundial, worth a lot of money (we estimate 800 Large Bronzes) and a case of tooled leather. By the feel of it, there are three scroll rods in there, but Destiny says we shouldn't open it. She spots a neatly inscribed rune near the hasp of the case. Although she doesn't know what it is, she might be able to find out later; in any case, it looks like a trap of some kind, and we don't want to risk damaging the scrolls inside (or ourselves for that matter).

Rather than investigate the mirror any further, we return to the study. It seems like a good idea to try to find out what this guy was up to before we can figure out what to do from here. A good search of the study reveals much. There are three flasks of viscous fluids, one of which Destiny recognises as an extremely potent healing potion. We have no idea about the other two, but they look like a couple of doses of the same stuff. There are also two books. One is a work of lore in Low Melnibonean, entitled The Lich: Myth or Reality? This one causes some consternation; the Lich is a dreaded creature from legend, a necromantic servant of the Lords of Chaos who achieves immortality of the spirit, but not of the body. The other book is inscribed in High Melnibonean, the language of sorcery, but Destiny says it will require more study. There are also some more valuables: a mechanical device, a model that shows the relative positions of the earth, the moon and the sun; and a matched pair of hourglasses of gold inlaid with gems (400 LB for the pair).

Marion suddenly spins around. "There's a noise coming from that trough!" Sure enough, some disgusting schlurping sounds get louder as the mud coalesces into two rising parodies of human form - mud men!? They start to slime their way out of the trough and towards us, spaces in the misshapen lumps that pass for heads doing a passable imitation of open mouths. One of them spits goo at Sir Blanque and covers a large proportion of his left leg. It starts to solidify, and he can't seem to get it off. It is starting to slow him down, though - and who knows what will happen when someone is immobilised by one of these things?

A bizarre melee develops as we try to slice our way through the mud beasts, and they spit gobs of slime at us. Our weapons seem to have relatively little effect, but a combination of enough small wounds seems to discomfit the things. Sir Blanque tries to bash one with his shield, but it gets stuck and his left arm ends up covered in the goo before he manages to pull it free; another lucky hit catches Destiny across her belly. I'm not sure what annoys her more, the encumbering effect, or the look of her clothing. Anyway, we eventually dispatch them, with Marion delivering the final blows, and they dissolve into rather smelly pools of mud, fortunately with no more signs of life. Within a few minutes, the mud on Sir Blanque and Destiny hardens, and then can just be pulled off them. "You could suffocate in that stuff," Marion realises.

She also spots something glistening in the trough. Previously concealed by the now dead squishy things, we find a couple of human skeletons, along with some animals, all neatly stripped of flesh. We realise this could have been our own fate. The smaller of the two humans is wearing the lacquered wooden armour of the horse peoples, and strangely enough it hasn't decayed or warped, despite being submerged. If anything, it looks as though it has been strengthened by immersion in the mud, and the only person it fits is me, so I substitute it for my own, rather utilitarian set. The other body has an intact belt pouch contain some three rather valuable gems (750 Large Bronzes' worth in total).

Destiny pulls us all together, after freeing herself of the mud. It doesn't seem to have had any lasting effects. "It seems clear that the guy who owned this place was seriously researching temporal magics, and we obviously can't get away from here." Sir Blanque agrees. "This place could have been in wintry limbo for weeks, even months." Marion frowns in concentration. "I remember a story from when I was growing up in Aflitain. The street kids were chattering about a weird old man from Ilmiora who was asking all sorts of questions about time; he seemed to be a sage doing some very strange experiments. I wonder if this is the same bloke? His name was Auquhol, or something like that."

After this encounter, we lose all patience with the four-armed statue, and Marion uses her newly acquired dagger to slide open the compartment in its base. Inside are two scrolls. The first is a very good drawing of a key that looks exactly like those 'Auquhol' was holding in the mirror. The second is inscribed with a short series of notes in Low Melnibonean:

1st key:  Tomb of Carline
2nd key: Vaults beneath the Capitol Museum
3rd Key: Village of Children
4th key: Old Father Time

So now there is no option; we're going to have to go back to that mirror in the other room. After all, there is nowhere else to go.


Umpire's Notes
Stats for the Mud men, translated into Stormbringer terms:

STR 2D8+8
CON 2D8+8
SIZ 2D8+8
INT 1D8
POW 2D8+8
DEX 2D8
CHA 1D8

Spit goo: 60%. Solidifies across a location, doing 3 points of damage equivalent and slowing the opponent by 3 DEX. A full immobilisation by reducing either DEX or hit points to zero results in the mud man flowing over its victim, suffocating it and absorbing it slowly over a period of hours equal to the victim's SIZ. Every five points of SIZ translates to an extra point of CON and one of SIZ for the mud man; this is how they feed and grow. Larger sized mud men can spit more goo - adjust accordingly, say 1 point for every five points of SIZ; so a SIZ 15 mud man spits 3 goo, while one of SIZ 20 spits 4.

Special defence: no armour, but edged weapons do half damage; blunt weapons get stuck, requiring a STR roll to get free, and also resulting in an automatic mud attack success against the appropriate limb of the attacker. Piercing/thrusting weapons are totally useless. Mud men have no hit locations or major wound levels as such - you just need to do the full damage overall to 'kill' them, which can take a while. Once their hit points are all lost, they loss what integrity they have and dissolve into a foul-smelling mass.

Description: Mud men things develop in rare circumstances such as the result of a spillage of magical materials into the natural world (making them the fantasy equivalent of an industrial accident). 1D8 of them will form, and they will mindlessly attack anything that comes within range of their habitat, the pool that spawned them. They feed by dissolving organic matter, starting with flesh. Leather etc. takes longer. However, resistant materials such as lacquered armour or metal will slowly become imbued with the same dweomer that powers the mud men, and it is possible that enhanced items might be found attached to the skeletons of their victims.


In case you hadn't figured it out, the picture at the top of this entry is of a couple of mud men. They arrived in the post yesterday from Otherworld Miniatures just before our game session in the evening. I haven't had time to paint them yet, but at least I was able to show the players what they were up against. I have to say that the service from Otherworld was excellent; I ordered two sets of two mud men, and they included a free sample figure, a really nice looking nasty mage type person. Time to get the paintbrushes out again!

The fight was fun; at one point Sir Blanque rolled a critical failure with his shield, which is why it got stuck. Marion was particularly impressive, slicing and dicing her way across the pair of the things.