Lars Blaine Diary 1

From Loranon

Dear Diary,

What a crazy jumble this has been! It's been more than a week since I've had a chance to sit down and write about my travels. An inauspicious start for an up-and-coming Bard, huh?

So I'd finally gotten into the snooze-fest that is Dormantown and was scoping out the local bar scene when I hear a cry out of nowhere! Everyone jumps up and starts to run out toward the noise, and what's a gnome to do but follow suit?

I stayed near the rear of the pack to keep out of trouble, but I just couldn't resist rushing up to help when I heard the yelling in orcish! I knew I'd be no help holding the city gates so I ran up on the wall, following some elf. He was awfully grey looking, I think he may have the leprosy. Anyway, he could shoot well enough! We were firing down on the group trying to batter down the door when some numbskull cast an obscuring mist over the whole area! I'm not sure who it was, but there was a sheepish looking drow skulking about down by the gate, so I have my suspicions.

So anyway, about that time we hear this awful scream from the north wall, and someone yells something about a breach. We run down that way and see this HUUUGE orc with an enormous greataxe! I am getting ready to shoot at him when he just cuts a couple of people in half. Now I am always one to tell a story, but there is a time when you have to look out for your own tail if you want to keep it! I start running back down the wall toward the west gate (the one where we first heard the sounds) and along the way get impaled by 5 or 6 javelins.

Now I know what you're thinking, sweetie. How can I possibly be writing this with 5 or 6 javelins sticking out of my tiny little chest? Wouldn't they get in the way of the pen? Well it was about that time that I woke up dead. Well, mostly dead. It was all shadowy and there were these nasty slug things coming at me! I got up and ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction, as any prudent adventurer would. Discretion is the better part of valor, after all.

So I'm running along and running along, and I come out in this sort of cave area. It's a bit less...intangible than everything else around, so I make a run for it. For some reason, the slug things seemed not to follow. It was about that time that a few other shadowy people had come to the same place. That dreamy yet pallid elf from earlier, the creepy drow, a couple of dwarves, and 5 humans. Obviously it made more sense for us to work together, weaponless here in this shadow realm, so we started to explore the cave system together. Somehow the very feel of the place kept talking to a minimum. I would have liked to learn some about my fellow explorers, but we were all fairly tight-lipped. Even yours-truly for once!

So we creep up through a long narrow cave and come out in a room with a pentagram on the floor painted in blood. Here I am, little Lars, exploring some sort of evil ruins! Now here is where it gets really creepy, and I mean really. Creepier than the drow (That reminds me. Wouldn't a half-drow pretty much look like a grey elf too?). We take a closer look at the pentagram and realize that OUR bodies are there on the ground. Closer inspection led us to find shadowy weapons on the corpses, weapons eerily similar to the ones we'd carried in life.

The next days are a blur. We fought horrible creatures, rested, then fought again! They seemed to take us to the brink of death over and over, but we always managed to recover and press on (except for the poor fella who got impaled, but that's a story for another time!).

Eventually we came to a room with six fake coffins and a sarcophagus. I’m not sure whose bright idea it was, but we decided to push the top off of the sarcophagus and say hello to the skeleton inside! Looking at the creature, we realize that the three necks without heads may be related to the three heads without necks we’d stumbled across earlier. We sucker one of the dumber looking humans into carrying them back and placing them on the necks. Unfortunately, it seemed he did not possess the skill necessary, as the heads flew across the room and out jumped some ghouls!

For the next few days, we played around with putting the heads on the skeleton and fought ghouls with each failure. Never has an epic struggle seemed so tedious!

Well I finally got fed up with their tomfoolery and started yelling at them all to think this thing through instead of trying random combinations! We sit down and start to think over the clues we’ve got, and realize that we also found 6 gemstones along with the three skulls. These seem to be just about perfectly matched to the eye sockets, so we reluctantly try placing the skulls along with gems into the sarcophagus. Whammy! No deal.

At least now the end was in sight. We kept on trying and trying, til suddenly I thought “Hey, let’s look on the back of the lid!” Here we found a color wheel which, while I’m not sure why we didn’t get this before, led us to try placing complementary colors next to each other. The two unopenable doors in the room burst open and we stopped to rest yet again.

It is here that my tale must end for now, sweetie, as it is time for us to get a move on and see what is behind these doors!